February 6, 2006 10:57

Bob Dylan gets to work on new album

First LP in five years on the way

Photo Gallery: Bob Dylan
Photo: Pa Photos

Bob Dylan is recording his first album of new songs in five years.

According to reports, he spent four days last week rehearsing the material with an unspecified band, prior to entering a studio this week.

The album is planned as the long-awaited follow-up to 2001's ‘Love & Theft’, and follows the success of the soundtrack to Martin Scorcese's 2005 biopic, ‘No Direction Home’.

Dylan and five unnamed musicians rehearsed the new material from Tuesday to Friday (January 31-February 3) last week behind closed doors at the Bardavon Opera House in Poughkeepsie, New York, reports the local paper The Poughkeepsie Journal.

"It was experimental, all kinds of different licks," according to the venue's executive director Chris Silva, who watched the sessions. "They would get into one thing and they would go over it and over it, then they would change gears."

Silva added that Dylan rehearsed for four to five hours each day without a break, and indicated that recording sessions would start in a Manhattan studio this week.

Since the release of ‘Love & Theft’, the only new Dylan recordings to appear have been on film soundtracks, The most recent, 'Tell Ol' Bill', was released on the OST to the Nick Caro-directed film ‘North Country’.