A month after releasing his new album Shadows of the Night, Bob Dylan premiered a black-and-white music video for “The Night We Called It A Day” that centers around a volatile love triangle.
The stylish music video stars Bob Dylan and Robert Davi, known for playing a James Bond villain and performing Sinatra tunes, as two men who have the hots for the femme fatale burlesque dancer played by Tracy Phillips.
Dylan crosses Davi, the engaged gangster, and is caught fooling around with the gangster’s fiancée (Phillips). Then everything immediately goes south. Per the film noir standard, what follows is betrayal, gun fights, cold-blooded murder, death and getaway cars. That all happens to the tune of Dylan’s “The Night We Called It a Day,” which provides a sharp contrast to the action occurring. His vocals create a serene and glamorous atmosphere that is punctured by the brutality.
His music video was directed by Nash Edgerton who has done stunts for almost every major action movie. Edgerton has directed some of Dylan’s other short videos including Duquesne Whistle, Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ and Must Be Santa.
But where did this obsession with Frank Sinatra come from? According to Rolling Stone, during almost every encore last fall Dylan performed Sinatra’s 1964 single “Stay With Me.”
"It was a real privilege to make this album," said Dylan in a statement about Shadows of the Night published by Pitchfork. "I've wanted to do something like this for a long time but was never brave enough to approach 30-piece complicated arrangements and refine them down for a five-piece band. That's the key to all these performance. We knew these songs extremely well. It was all done live. Maybe one or two takes. No overdubbing. No vocal booths. No headphones. No separate tracking, and, for the most part, mixed as it was recorded. I don't see myself as covering these songs in any way,”
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