Columbia Records Posts Bob Dylan’s “Stay With Me”

The official release of Stay With Me from soon-to-be-released CD and album Shadows In The Night is live on YouTube

By Stephen Pate – Yesterday Bob Dylan fans who pre-ordered “Shadows in the Night – Bob Dylan” from iTunes got a bonus in their downloads of the song “Stay With Me.”

Today Sony/Columbia Records posted a video of the album song on YouTube and Vevo.

Sinatra fans will recognize that Dylan has shrunk the lavish 100+ piece orchestra Frank Sinatra used to a tasty and sparse 5-piece band including a steel guitar.

Bob Dylan critics are praising the song for exploring new depths in a song made famous by the great Frank Sinatra.

“Dylan deftly sidesteps my own initial misgivings, finding a craggly sense of fortitude within the song’s familiar paces. Playing with a reconstituted, small-band arrangement, he sounds lonesome but not nearly as alone as was Sinatra back in the early 1960s. I found myself hearing new things from a pair of very old friends,” said Nick Deriso on Something Else.

“The stirring strings on the more familiar earlier take are replaced here by the spaciousness of a steel guitar, allow Bob Dylan’s echoing voice to sit center stage in a way that even Frank Sinatra couldn’t entirely inhabit, awash as he was before with that swooning band.”

“If Dylan’s take “Stay With Me,” so different in both manner and tone, is any indication, Shadows In The Night could end up surprising more than a few naysayers when it arrives on February 3, 2015, via Columbia. It’s certainly changed my mind.”

“Stay With Me” was often used last year by Dylan as his closing song after “Blowing in the Wind” during the last leg of the 2014 version of the Never Ending Tour.

Stay With Me

“Stay With Me” is another of the Frank Sinatra ballads Bob Dylan is covering in his unique and eagerly anticipated “Shadows in the Night” album due February 3, 2015.

iTunes will release the song a few minutes after midnight on February 3rd. This is the 2nd song iTunes has pre-released. We also got “Full Moon and Empty Arms” on December 11, 2014.

The song was composed by Carolyn Leigh & Jerome Moross and sung by Frank Sinatra in 1963 as the main theme for motion picture The Cardinal.

It certainly is a plaintive song, a song about waiting for God when one is old and humble.

Should my heart not be humble, should my eyes fail to see,
Should my feet sometimes stumble on the way, stay with me.
Like the lamb that in springtime wanders far from the fold,
Comes the darkness and the frost, I get lost, I grow cold.

I grow cold, I grow weary, and I know I have sinned,
And I go seeking shelter and I cry in the wind.
Though I grope and I blunder and I’m weak and I’m wrong,
Though the road buckles under where I walk, walk along.

Till I find to my wonder every path leads to Thee,
All that I can do is pray, stay with me,
Stay with me.

You can order “Stay with Me” as well from Amazon.com from Shadows In The Night if you live in the United States or another country with Amazon.com digital services.

Shadows In The Night is available for pre-order in the United States, Amazon.ca in Canada and Amazon.co.uk in the United Kingdom where it will be available one day early on February 2, 2015.

Also available from iTunes “Shadows in the Night – Bob Dylan“.

Follow NJN

• Twitter – @sdpate
• Facebook at NJN Network
• OyeTimes and IMA News Buzz
• Add the NJN icon to your desktop
• Subscribe and get new stories by email