Bob Dylan - SEC Armadillo, Glasgow, Britain, 11-17-2025
For many, many years, there were next to no Dylan new concert bootlegs with soundboard-level sound quality. The only exceptions since 2000 or so (and I've posted most of them at my blog already) are due to IEM technology. "IEM" stands for "in-ear monitor." Basically, instead of everything going through wires, these days many concerts broadcast the music wirelessly so the band members can hear what the others are playing. And every now and then, people manage to pick up that signal and record it, even though it has a very, very limited broadcast frequency. I'm pretty sure that's what happened here, although it's just generically described as a soundboard by the people who made the original liner notes.
Actually, the people who recorded this also recorded the concert the day before, held in the same Glasgow venue. I decided to post only one, since the set lists were basically identical. (Dylan pretty much played the same songs for the entire short European tour this was a part of. But, as I mentioned above, it's a drastically different set from what he was playing earlier in the year.) So I read some reviews. Both shows were rated highly. Generally, most people think Dylan has been "on" during this tour, singing well and clearly, and generally being engaged. But I read slightly better things about the November 17th concert, so I decided to process that one.
And it turns out it needed a lot of processing. The main problem is that there was virtually NO audience noise whatsoever. Furthermore, the people who turned it into a bootleg cut out everything but the music, probably since they figured it would sound strange to hear dead silence between songs. But the downside is that made it sound like one long song. I think having clear breaks between songs really helps.
So I wanted to fix things, but there was no audience noise to work with at all. I decided on a drastic approach I've never used before. I downloaded an audience bootleg of a Dylan concert from Dublin, which took place a few days after this one. Then, using the MVSEP program, I split the crowd noise from the music for all those songs. Then I took the crowd noise from the beginnings and ends of each of the songs and pasted them into the same songs in this concert. It helped greatly that the set lists were almost exactly the same, with one extra song played in Dublin. Thus, what you're getting here is the real audience reaction to each song, song by song. It's just that the reaction is from a different concert that took place a few days later.
Anyway, I don't know how confusing that sounds. But the bottom line is that the appropriate sounding audience noise has been added, when there had been no audience noise at all. So I think that makes this a big improvement from the version I took it from. I've left in the original notes, so you can see who to thank, and what they did.
I made some other changes as well. The main one is that, occasionally, I noticed some brief dropouts, lasting a second or less. That's not long, but it's long enough for my ear to notice something was off. Every time I heard one of those dropouts, I tracked down the exact spot and did some audio editing to fill in the silence. Since they were very short dropouts, I usually fixed it just by stretching the music on either side a little bit to fill in the gap. That happened in a bunch of songs. I've included "[Edit]" in the titles of two songs where I found two or three such gaps. But there were some others where I found one, and fixed those as well.
Oh, by the way, track 17, where the other band members are introduced, comes entirely from the Dublin show. Dylan makes those introductions in every concert. But it seems the people who made this bootleg cut everything but the songs so thoroughly that they cut that too. Since that comes from a middling sounding boot, I ran that track through the Adobe Enhance Speech program to make his banter more intelligible.
This album is an hour and 48 minutes long.
01 I'll Be Your Baby Tonight (Bob Dylan)
02 It Ain't Me, Babe [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
03 I Contain Multitudes (Bob Dylan)
04 False Prophet (Bob Dylan)
05 When I Paint My Masterpiece (Bob Dylan)
06 Black Rider (Bob Dylan)
07 My Own Version of You (Bob Dylan)
08 To Be Alone with You (Bob Dylan)
09 Crossing the Rubicon (Bob Dylan)
10 Desolation Row (Bob Dylan)
11 Key West [Philosopher Pirate] (Bob Dylan)
12 Watching the River Flow (Bob Dylan)
13 It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (Bob Dylan)
14 I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
15 Mother of Muses (Bob Dylan)
16 Goodbye Jimmy Reed (Bob Dylan)
17 talk (Bob Dylan)
18 Every Grain of Sand (Bob Dylan)
don't know where or when the cover image is from. I just know it's from 2025. I could have found a better photo probably, but I thought this was fitting with his face partially obscured, since he's taken to practically hiding on stage. Apparently, if you go see him in concert in recent years, you're lucky to get to see even this much of his face.
