Tag Archives: Top 200

Bob Dylan’s ‘Shadows In The Night’ To Chart At #1?

While the sales info is not all in yet for Bob Dylan’s latest album, Shadows In The Night (SoundScan won’t reveal the numbers until next Wednesday), and the album has only been available for five days, I believe it will debut on the Billboard charts this coming week at #1.

This is speculation on my part, but based on the album’s current ranking at Amazon, I think I’ll turn out to be right on the money.

The album is currently #1 on both Amazon’s Pop and Rock charts. And it’s already #1 on the Swedish chart.

However today the album was #13 on the iTunes album chart.

Still, since iTunes only tracks digital sales while Amazon tracks CD and digital sales, I think the Amazon chart is likely a better gauge of how the album will do in the Billboard Top 200.

The Dylan album has gotten a tremendous critical reception with rave reviews in Rolling Stone, the New York Times, England’s The Guardian, Paste magazine and numerous others.

Writing in The Guardian, Alexis Petridis ends his review:

Dylanologists could doubtless tell you a lot about the relationship between the songs here and his own oeuvre: you suspect they’ll have a field day with the religious overtones of Stay With Me. To say that all seems besides the point isn’t to rubbish their close reading and study, which at its best is genuinely illuminating. It’s merely to suggest that Shadows in the Night works as an unalloyed pleasure, rather than a research project. It may be the most straightforwardly enjoyable album Dylan’s made since Time Out of Mind. He’s an unlikely candidate to join the serried ranks of rock stars tackling standards: appropriately enough, given that Frank Sinatra sang all these songs before him, he does it his way, and to dazzling effect.

In Paste magazine Douglas Heselgrave writes:

Musically speaking, all of the songs on Shadows In The Night never come off as anything less than fabulous.

If Shadows In The Night charts at #1 this coming week, it will be Dylan’s third U.S. chart-topper since 2000. Both Modern Times and Together Through Life charted at #1. Dylan’s last album of new recordings, Tempest, reached #3 on the Billboard Top 200. And while Dylan’s Christmas In The Heart did’t top the Billboard Top 200, it reached #1 on Billboard’s Holiday and Folk Albums charts.

So what do you think? Will Shadows In The Night chart at #1 in the Billboard Top 200.

[I published True Love Scars in August of 2014.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]