‘Pressing On’ – Bob Dylan, 1980
After seeing the film about Bob Dylan at the weekend called I’m Not There, I decided to post about this song today. The film itself was pretty good but only in terms of the direction the Director chose to take in making and protraying Dylan in the film. Six different actors were used to protray Dylan at various stages of his career, including Cate Blanchett who gave a great performance.
Personally I would prefer No Direction Home but mainly because it gives some great archive footage of the great man himself. What this film did do however, was introduce a few new Dylan songs that I have never heard of before including Tombstone Blues and today’s song Pressing On which appears on the album Saved which was the second album by Dylan that dealt with Gospel music after he became a Born Again Christian. If this song is anything to go by then I will definitely be checking out both Gospel albums that he released in the late 70’s / early 80’s. Here is a link to a video of the song.
By the way, the soundtrack to the film I’m Not There is absolutely fanastic! It consists of a large number of today’s best musician’s doing covers of Dylan songs and they generally don’t consist of his famous songs. It is really interesting to see other interpretations of the great man’s work and is definitely well worth checking out.
November 19th, 2008 at 2:45 am
I didn’t appreciate this song until I heard the cover for “I’m Not There” soundtrack. I’d largely overlooked and ignored Dylan’s born-again period collectively, but it has a handful of gems such as this which are worth revisiting.
“Tombstone Blues” is lyrically eloquence and it’s debatable if it’s one of the top three tracks on “Highway 61 Revisited,” which tells you how great that album was.