Dave Stewart on His Dylan Covers Album, ‘Jam Sessions’ With Bob in the ’80s & What He Thinks of ‘A Complete Unknown’

Lest you think of Dave Stewart’s Record Store Day project, Dave Does Dylan, as opportunistic, the hirsute male half of Eurythmics is quick to put the record straight.

“I had no idea when I started doing this that the (A Complete Unknown) movie was coming out and the whole outburst of stuff about Timothée Chalamet and about (Bob) Dylan,” Stewart tells Billboard via Zoom from his studio in Nashville. “These (recordings) have been around before that, and I have had some real interesting, amazing times with (Dylan), so this wasn’t a great stretch for me.”

Dave Does Dylan — out Saturday (April 12) in limited edition and slated for wider release during the summer — features 14 solo acoustic recordings of Dylan tracks such as “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Forever Young,” “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” “Visions of Johanna” and more. They’re songs Stewart recorded on his iPhone over time — during breaks in the studio, in his hotel rooms on tour or backstage at gigs. “Whenever I was waiting in-between something, I just started to put an iPhone on a little stick and sing a Bob Dylan song. I was just doing it for fun, and then I would put one up on Instagram every now and then and people would say, ‘Oh, we love this! Why don’t you make an album of this?’

“I didn’t take any of it seriously. Then my management company said, ‘We’d love to put this out on vinyl on Record Store Day.’ I had 24 songs, so then it was, ‘OK, we have to cut it down to fit on an album unless it’s a double album,’ which we didn’t want to do. So we picked these (14), and I think you can hear that I have a deep connection to the songs and you can hear every word, even though we couldn’t really mix them because the guitar and the voice are going down the same mics.”

The set pays tribute to Dylan beyond the music, too. The cover is literally a tip of the cap, with Stewart striking a pose similar to Dylan’s on his 1969 album Nashville Skyline — hat and acoustic guitar included. The package also includes a photo of Stewart and Dylan together during the filming of the latter’s “Blood In My Eyes” video during 1993.

Dylan voiced his support of the project in a statement announcing the album: “Captain Dave is a dreamer and a fearless innovator, a visionary of high order, very delicately tractable on the surface but beneath that, he’s a slamming, thumping, battering ram, very mystical but rational and sensitive when it comes to the hot irons of art forms. An explosive musician, deft guitar player, innately recognizes the genius in other people and puts it into play without being manipulative. With him, there’s mercifully no reality to yesterday. He is incredibly gracious and soulful, can command the ship and steer the course, dragger, trawler or man of war, Captain Dave.”

Stewart’s connection to Dylan’s music is long, as well as deeply felt.

He came to it as a teenager in Sunderland, England, at a time when a broken leg sidelined him from his serious pursuit of soccer. His mother had left the family and his beloved older brother had gone to college. Salvation of sorts came from a package sent by a cousin who’d moved to Memphis; it included pairs of Levi corduroy jeans and a couple of blues albums that Stewart, laid up and “bored out of my mind,” began to play incessantly — followed by Dylan.

“I think it was (1964’s) Another Side of Bob Dylan or something around that,” Stewart recalls. “And it blew my mind. I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of his mouth. And then I realized he obviously was influenced by the blues-type records I had. There’s certain moments in time when you know something happened to you, and that was one of them. I would smoke Thai sticks and lie on my back on the floor and put on Blonde On Blonde or something. All those songs were imprinted on my brain. The general public would probably think, like, ‘Dave Stewart, Eurythmics, singing Bob Dylan songs? Really?’ But when I was a kid, I was singing those songs in folk clubs. I knew them by heart, so on (Dave Does Dylan) I’m playing them like I was in a folk club again.”

Stewart connected with Dylan around 1985, when he was producing the self-titled debut album for former Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey. “The phone rang and it was the receptionist in the studio, and she said, ‘Bob Dylan’s on the phone for Dave Stewart,'” he recalls. “I thought it was (Sharkey) just messing about, ’cause he knew I was a massive Bob Dylan fan. So I picked up the phone and went, ‘Feargal….’ And then (Dylan) started talking, and nobody could imitate that voice.”

Dylan proposed a meet-up and that evening he joined Stewart at nearby Thai restaurant for food and sake, then took him to a private Mexican club south of Los Angeles. “We sat there and we were talking in there for ages, and then Bob suggested, ‘Why don’t we make a (video) tomorrow?'” Stewart says with a laugh. “It was already, like, one in the morning, but I rang some people and pulled a thing together at a church right on Highland and we shot ‘Emotionally Yours.’ And then we did another one and we became friends.”

Stewart went on to film other videos for Dylan and also played on 1986’s Knocked Out Loaded. “We had jam sessions,” Stewart explains. “I have recordings of me and him around the kitchen table in my house in London, at one in the morning or something. To get to witness that happening, making up words on the spot and playing acoustic guitar and drinking tequila or whatever, those are experiences I’ll never forget — especially to have been a kid listening to (Dylan’s) record with a broken leg and my mom leaving home, there was a particularly sort of poignant feeling about it, and so I feel very privileged.

“I don’t know why or how it happened,” Stewart continues. “For some reason people find (Dylan) quite sort of reserved or whatever…but he wasn’t with me at all. At the time you think, ‘Oh, this is wild,’ but now, looking back as I’m older…you go, ‘God, yeah, I had that experience, and many other kinds of experiences with these incredible talents, and I’ll never forget them.’”

Stewart — who filmed an episode of Recorded Live at Analog that will premiere during July on PBS — says there’s a possibility of the other 10 Dylan songs he recorded turning into a second volume of Dave Sings Dylan, perhaps adding more to the pile. “It wasn’t very difficult to record, so, yeah, I may do that,” he says. “With an artist like Bob Dylan people say, ‘What’s your favorite song?’ and it’s impossible. I’ve got, like 99 favorite songs, so it wouldn’t be very hard to do more.”

As for A Complete Unknown, Stewart says that “Timothée Chalamet did a great performance along with the rest of the cast. For me, I felt that it only scratches the surface of Dylan as a songwriter — the spark that set the world on fire, and to this day, has not been equaled in his influence. Nothing since The Canterbury Tales has created such a paradigm shift in people’s idea of what songwriting can or could be.”