News

In March, Big Thief stopped by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to debut a song they had been playing live at shows: “Vampire Empire.” Now, on Wednesday, July 19th, the band has released the official studio version of the single. Listen to the track below.

“Vampire Empire” has been a hit among Big Thief fans since videos of the live version began circulating online, partly due to the tune’s lyrics, which speak to the complications of gender expression and queer identity in the context of a relationship. In a statement, vocalist Adrianne Lenker said: “For me, it’s about getting out of toxic internal patterns — leaving the empire of energy drains that obscure pure essence, learning about what healthy boundaries are, and finding the power to implement them for the possibility of giving and receiving (both inwardly and outwardly) unbroken and infinite Love.”

Accordingly, Lenker’s impassioned vocals convey a sense of searching.

It’s always hard to trust that a biopic will do its subject justice, but in the case of James Mangold’s upcoming film about Bob Dylan, it looks like we’re in good hands. Mangold told IndieWire that the iconic singer-songwriter gave the director notes for his script for A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet as Dylan.

“I’ve spent several, wonderfully charming, days in his company, just one-on-one, talking to him,” Mangold said of Dylan. “I have a script that’s personally annotated by him and treasured by me. He loves movies. The first time I sat down with Bob, one of the first things he said to me was, ‘I love Cop Land’ [Mangold’s 1997 feature].”

It’s also assuring that A Complete Unknown will only depict a few years in Dylan’s life, rather than trying to cram his full story into a two-hour movie. According to Mangold, “It...

Following a number of disappointing blockbusters in May, there are a few promising ones this month (as glimpsed in our honorable mentions below), but it feels like we’ll have to wait until July for a trio of heavy hitters. In the meantime, June brings an eclectic mix of sturdy debuts, auteur-driven offerings, and accomplished documentaries.

15. Shadow Kingdom (Alma Har’el; June 6)

Technically released in limited capacity a couple years ago, the Bob Dylan concert film Shadow Kingdom is now getting proper distribution. As Nick Newman said in our summer movie preview, “Your local Bob Dylan obsessive has surely mentioned Shadow Kingdom, the 2021 concert film that saw him rework an assortment of earlier songs––some established, some deeper in the back catalogue. One case (‘To Be Alone with You’) marked an almost-total rewrite, and courtesy the end credits (which we now know is called ‘Sierra’s Theme’) an entirely new track.

For fully half of Bob Dylan’s career, his primary focus has been the road. Since the late Eighties, he’s done plus-or-minus a hundred shows a year, pandemic excepted. Along the way, he’s been remaking his catalog, twisting the classics into drastic new shapes. He’d always done that, of course, from turning his folk songs into electric rock in the mid-Sixties, on down to his infamous speed-snarl through “Masters of War” at the Grammy Awards in 1991. That sense of constant evolution also seems to have played a...