Bob Dylan will preview two songs from his new album, Tempest, on the American TV show Strike Back, according to breaking news this morning.
We’ll get two songs – “Early Roman Kings” and “Scarlet Town”. You can “Early Roman Kings” below, on a video of clips from the new series of Strike Back, while “Scarlet Town” will play over the end credits of an episode showing on Friday, August 17 on the Cinemax channel.
Strike Back, it seems, is a globe-trotting action series about a top secret intelligence agency – you might think of Ultimate Force with a higher production budget. But for our purposes, what’s more interesting here is that this is the first time Dylan’s chosen to debut new music via the trailer for a TV show.
Dylan, of course, has a history of releasing songs by this kind of unorthodox method. Thanks to our own Damien Love – an assiduous Dylan spotter – here’s a list of previous instances where a Dylan song, at the time unavailable anywhere else, has appeared in a film or TV.
Dylan’s cover of Dean Martin’s “Return To Me” recorded specifically for the Sopranos soundtrack
“Tell Ol Bill” for the movie North Country
“Cross The Green Mountain” for Gods & Generals
“Huck’s Tune” for the movie Lucky You
“Things Have Changed” for Wonderboys
“Waitin For You” for Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
“People Get Ready” for Flashback
“You Belong To Me” Natural Born Killers
Let us know if there’s any others we might have missed!
There’s other, weird Bob TV interactions, too.
You can check out his 1999 cameo in on Dharma And Greg here. My personal favourite, however, is his appearance on Pawn Stars – an American reality TV series about a pawn shop in Las Vegas – where Dylan’s supposedly doorstepped in Vegas and signs a copy of Self Portrait for one of the show’s presenters.
Anyway, here’s the clip for “Early Roman Kings”.