Bob Dylan Doesn't Need to Fear Death. His Art Makes Him Immortal.
Rough and Rowdy Ways, Bob Dylan’s 39th studio album, is his first collection of new, original songs since 2012. But the guy didn’t go missing for those eight years: In that time, he released five discs of pop standards recorded by Frank Sinatra and six volumes of his “Bootleg Series” reissue packages (including an 18-CD box containing every note he recorded in the studio in 1965 and 1966 and a 36-disc set documenting his 1966 tour); launched the Heaven’s Door line of whiskeys and appeared in a Chrysler ad; exhibited his paintings, drawings, and sculptures, was the subject of a documentary by Martin Scorsese chronicling the 1975 Rolling Thunder tour, played more than 500 concerts on his ongoing “Never-Ending Tour,” and—oh, yeah—swung by Stockholm to pick up a Nobel Prize for Literature. Fan sites devoted to Dylan have no problem finding new material about the guy every single day (take it from me, as one of the freaks who reads them).
So it’s not like this is a comeback record for Dylan, who recently turned 79. And while we have no idea how involved he was in many of these projects—he made his disinterest in the Rolling Thunder project obvious on camera—all of this work offered him the opportunity to consider across the music he has made for the past six decades, and the music that shaped him before that.
That observation and reflection is what emerges on the remarkable Rough and Rowdy Ways, an album that somehow manages to sound like nothing he has ever done before, and that looks back across a long and hard-fought life while still insisting on always looking forward. “I can’t remember when I was born,” he sings, “and I forgot when I died.”
The record was teased with the sudden appearance in March of “Murder Most Foul,” a seventeen-minute, nearly tuneless meditation on the Kennedy assassination, stuffed with details about the event, unspooling into a lengthy list of song titles, giving the sense that it was music that pulled the nation through the tragedy that signaled “the age of the anti-Christ,” and music which will ultimately tell our history. Even some of the biggest Dylan fans I know found it unlistenable and tedious; once the shock wore off, I was mesmerized, and couldn’t listen to anything else for weeks.
Two more songs followed—the gentle and contemplative “I Contain Multitudes” and the sly, loping blues “False Prophet”—which sounded great but felt maybe a bit too on-the-nose (“I’m a man of contradiction/I’m a man of many moods”). Those two tracks open the new album, with “Murder Most Foul” coming at the end, actually on a separate disc in the CD release. Along with the seven songs in between, they reveal an astonishing intensity and hunger, and a consistency that marks the album as one of Dylan’s major works.
Dylan’s 21st century albums have followed a blueprint laid out on 2001’s “Love and Theft,” alternating between blues, country-tinged rockabilly, and Great American Songbook-style pop. You might expect that exploring the Sinatra repertoire would result in a more concise and classic songwriting approach, but what has happened is just the opposite—the songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways are almost uncategorizable. They draw on multiple musical traditions at once, taking their time (more than half of the songs clock in at six minutes or longer), shifting gears and switching tone. Some of them have no discernable or regular refrain; three tracks have no drums.
The stately “Mother of Muses” feels like a lost Civil War ballad, and the plaintive, swaying “I Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” is one of the most straightforward and sweet love songs in his catalogue. “My Own Version of You,” with its repetitive, descending lilt, is something completely different, a modern-day Frankenstein story (“I’m looking for the necessary body parts/Limbs and livers and brains and hearts”) that opens up into a reflection on life’s meaning—“Can you tell me what it means to be or not to be?”
The unconventional ways these songs unfold often mean that you drift away for a moment and then return to a very different place. The curious nine-and-a-half minute dreamscape “Key West,” with Dylan murmuring over a hypnotic accordion, plays like a travel brochure from the Florida Chamber of Commerce (“Key West is fine and fair/If you lost your mind, you’ll find it there”), and then suddenly the narrator is 12 years old and marrying a prostitute. The spare and ominous “Black Rider” sees Dylan negotiating with the apocalyptic titular figure—“Let all of your Earthly thoughts be a prayer”—but then threatening him with a sword and sneering “The size of your cock will get you nowhere.”
Even the three blues songs are far from simple genre exercises. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” borrows its swaggering swing from the legend it’s named for, and the dazzling, ferocious “Crossing the Rubicon” lurches with a stop-and-start rhythm that threatens to fall apart at any minute, with Dylan’s high-wire phrasing feeling its way from line to line.
What leaps off of Rough and Rowdy Ways—named for a 1929 song by country music pioneer Jimmie Rodgers, “The Singing Brakeman”—is Dylan’s blazing sense of purpose and focus. The man is not bullshitting. It comes through, full of humor and rage and heartbreak, in every word as they are written and sung. There’s no filler, no unfinished edges, whether his battle-scarred voice is a vulnerable croon or a menacing rasp.
As Dylan enters his 80th year, it would be easy to say that this is an album about staring down death. The very first words are “Today and tomorrow and yesterday, too/The flowers are dying, like all things do,” and that doesn’t let up until JFK has breathed his last breath. Mortality litters the lyrics—“I’ve already outlived my life by far,” “I hope that the gods go easy on me,” “I’m three miles south of purgatory/One step from the Great Beyond.”
But death has never been far from Dylan’s work; his self-titled debut, recorded in 1961 when he was 20 years old, included “In My Time of Dyin’,” “Fixin’ to Die,” and closed with “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” Fatalism has always been part of the musical history and lexicon, the basic building blocks, from which he draws, and it sure hovers near the surface of our times.
Besides, he has often warned us not to look for literal autobiography in his—or anyone’s—work. In a recent interview with the New York Times, he described some of these new songs as “trance writing,” noting that “they just fall down from space. I’m just as bewildered as anybody else as to why I write them.” This has always been his line: in an episode of his “Theme Time Radio Hour” show that I recently revisited, he said, “You can never tell why someone’s gonna stick something in a song…You can’t expect to understand everything in every song.” (It seems worth noting that he said this prior to playing a song by Daffy Duck, followed by a selection from Captain Beefheart.)
And somehow, for all of the death imagery, the effect of Rough and Rowdy Ways is something more elegiac and ultimately far more hopeful. Even as he snarls for vengeance against those who have betrayed him, references to history, literature, and music—from Julius Caesar to Mott the Hoople, William Blake to Anne Frank, Harry Truman to Bo Diddley—bounce through the album, culminating in the dizzying litany of “Murder Most Foul.” And in these echoes, in these songs that are incantations as much as they are compositions, we hear the treasures gathered and lessons learned by Bob Dylan over the years, and the sense that it is in art that we find something like immortality.
That’s what keeps him on the road after all these years, and keeps him searching and striving in his writing, inspiring multiple generations and still staking new territory in an incomparable career. “I’m the last of the best, you can bury the rest,” he sings on “False Prophet.” I’ll drink a Heaven’s Door whiskey to that.
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