Lloyd Cole has released his best album since rising to fame with 1984’s Rattlesnakes, and we have Bob Dylan to thank. Wait, what? Cole is as surprised by that turn of events as anyone.
“Overall, I’m happy with most of the records that I’ve made,” he tells Salon, “but I think I got to the point where I thought that gentlemen of a certain age shouldn’t make certain records.”
Then Cole got an assignment from Salon to review Dylan’s most recent studio effort — 2012’s Tempest, published under a headline that read “Best ever album by a 71 year old?” That led the singer-songwriter to a sharp reassessment of his own career. In particular, Cole says, his more recent focus on quietude, and conciseness.
“It was just immediately apparent that he has no idea of what age he is, even,” Cole says of Bob Dylan. “I think if you asked him what age he is he’d go, ‘yeah, I’m probably 60-something,’ and he certainly isn’t thinking about what’s appropriate. And I just thought, ‘well, what would happen if I tried to stop worrying about that stuff?'”
The results are apparent in the layered complexity of his just-issued Standards, which reanimates Lloyd Cole’s initial free-wheeling writing style even as it finds him exploring a few grittier rock-focused sounds.
“I think, ironically enough, that when you think you’re in your middle age and there’s something undignified about rocking, actually rock and roll sort of belongs to my generation,” Cole concludes. “Young people aren’t interested in rock and roll. And so I think when it came to actually making the record and committing to making it, that sort of reinvigorated the writing process and gave me some momentum.”
