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Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Columbia Records
Released: 2020.06.19
Time:
 53:59/16:54
Category: Pop/Rock
Producer(s): Bob Dylan
Rating:
Media type: 2xCD
Web address: www.bobdylan.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2020
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


Disc 1

[1] I Contain Multitudes (B.Dylan) - 4:36
[2] False Prophet (B.Dylan) - 6:00
[3] My Own Version of You (B.Dylan) - 6:41
[4] I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You (B.Dylan) - 6:32
[5] Black Rider (B.Dylan) - 4:12
[6] Goodbye Jimmy Reed (B.Dylan) - 4:13
[7] Mother of Muses (B.Dylan) - 4:29
[8] Crossing the Rubicon (B.Dylan) - 7:22
[9] Key West [Philosopher Pirate] (B.Dylan) - 9:34


Disc 2

[1] Murder Most Foul (B.Dylan) - 16:54

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Bob Dylan - Vocals, Guitar, Harmonica
Charlie Sexton - Guitar
Bob Britt - Guitar
Donnie Herron - Steel Guitar, Violin, Accordion, Mandolin
Tony Garnier - Bass Guitar, Acoustic Bass
Matt Chamberlain - Drums

Additional Musicians
Blake Mills
Benmont Tench
Alan Pasqua
Fiona Apple
Tommy Rhodes

Chris Shaw - Engineering, Mixing
Joseph Lorge - Assistant Engineering
Greg Calbi - Mastering
Ian Berry  Front Cover Photo
Josh Cheuse - Album Design
Andrea Orlandi - Inner Sleeve Photo On Vinyl Edition (Also used in Video for  [1])

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Bob Dylan released the dark, unruly Time Out of Mind in 1997 following two albums of folk and blues covers. It was his first original material in a decade and summed up his 20th century. Rough and Rowdy Ways is his first new material since 2012's Tempest and arrives during a global pandemic and the righteous struggle for racial and economic justice. These ten songs revel in forms that have been Dylan's métier since the '60s: blues, country, folk, rockabilly, gospel, etc. Its three pre-release singles - "Murder Most Foul," "I Contain Multitudes," and "False Prophet" - are showcases for a songwriter who speaks directly yet remains elusive.

"I Contain Multitudes" is a meditation on a life yet unfolding; historic figures - Anne Frank, William Blake, the Rolling Stones, etc. - jostle against archetypes of gunslingers: "…What can I tell ya? I sleep with life and death in the same bed…." "False Prophet" is a jeremiad disguised as blues house rocker. The protagonist testifies; he's a witness who confronts evil in history and real time. "Goodbye Jimmy Reed" celebrates the bluesman in his own house-rocking style to equate religion, sin, and redemption with romantic obsession and sex. "Crossing the Rubicon" is a roadhouse blues with the afterlife riding shotgun: "Three miles north of purgatory/One step from the great beyond/I pray to the cross/I kiss the girls/and I cross the Rubicon…." Dylan's band are loose and joyful; their raucousness carries his swagger and joy. The suspenseful, loungey "My Own Version of You" features grave robbing as it employs the inspiration of the Bride of Frankenstein to seek truth in taboo. "I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You," caressed by marimbas, and brushed snares, finds Dylan blurring distinctions between carnal and spiritual love. Conversely, "Black Rider" whistles past the graveyard, with a nasty caution: "… Don’t hug me, don’t turn on the charm/I'll take a sword and hack off your arm…." In the Celtic gospel of "Mother of Muses," he's a grateful supplicant, a servant who humbly requests transformation knowing full well he may not be entitled: "… wherever you are/I've already outlived my life by far…."

The album's final half-hour contains only two songs. The nine-plus-minute "Key West (Philosopher Pirate)" is a rambling dirge guided by a soft accordion in a stripped-down journey of longing and weariness; an acknowledgment of mortality with the ghosts of the Beats, Buddy Holly, and Jimi Hendrix alongside him. It stands with his best work from the '70s. That gentle sojourn prepares listeners for "Murder Most Foul," a sprawling, 17-minute lyrical, labyrinthian closer that moves through history, metaphor, and culture with JFK's assassination as its hub. It will be decoded for generations. Rough and Rowdy Ways is akin to transformational albums such as Love and Theft, and Slow Train Coming. It's a portrait of the artist in winter who remains vital and enigmatic. At nearly 80, Dylan's pen and guitar case still hold plenty of magic.

Thom Jurek - All Music Guide



When Bob Dylan became the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize in Literature back in 2016, he “got to wondering how my songs related to literature”. Instead of delivering his acceptance speech in person like most people, Dylan recorded one. In his “roundabout way”, he concluded that meaning is irrelevant; that story, sound and feeling are all that matter. So, like an ancient bard, he retold three classic tales – Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey – over the meandering tinkle of a cocktail piano.

His richly soporific new album – his first new material since 2012’s Tempest – plays like an extension of that speech: a folksy recitation of literary and pop references sprawling over long, ramshackle songs with minimal (mostly acoustic) melodies that sway back and forth behind him like curtains in a light breeze. Quotes from Homer, Shakespeare and Blake are shuffled with winks at Stevie Nicks and Patsy Cline. It’s a soothing fit for the lockdown mood in which time and meaning feel strangely stretched and untethered.

Fans will already have heard “Murder Most Foul”, the 17-minute epic that recasts the assassination of John F Kennedy as a Greek tragedy and gets its own CD here. The event that represented the Boomer generation’s loss of innocence occurred when Dylan was just 22 years old. He’d released his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, six months earlier and had already finished recording his third, The Times They Are a-Changin’. His next album would find him turn away from protest songs and look inward in a way that angered many in the earnest folk scene.

This month, he’s been looking and speaking out again. He’s called the killing of George Floyd “beyond ugly” and hoped that “justice comes swift”. He’s spoken out against the “arrogance” of our leaders in dealing with the pandemic. So when “Murder Most Foul” finds him lamenting “the age of the Antichrist”, he might have the Trump administration in mind. Although it’s all – as ever – anyone’s guess.

The track’s mood is a still, grey sky. Over a gentle wash of piano and cello, the 79-year-old Dylan – whose car now sports a World’s Best Grandpa bumper sticker – croaks: “Twas a dark day in Dallas, November ’63/ A day that will live on in infamy…” The early rhymes and clichés are a bit naff. Unlike Leonard Cohen, who famously took years over his lyrics, Dylan’s always been as likely to toss off lines as to hone them. This means “Murder Most Foul” takes a while to get going. But it’s worth hanging on for “What’s new, pussycat? What’d I say?/ I said the soul of a nation’s been torn away/ and it’s beginning to go into a slow decay/ and that it’s 36 hours past judgment day.” He’s talking about then and now. He tells us how to get through terrible times. Acknowledging the inevitability of sorrow and decline, he offers the solace of songs like last rites: “Play ‘Lucille’/ Play ‘Deep In a Dream’/ And play ‘Driving Wheel’/ Play “‘Moonlight Sonata’ in F-sharp… Don’t worry, Mr President/ Help’s on the way.”

Other songs find him in lighter mood. “I Contain Multitudes” toys with the writer’s long-time self-mythologising and is sardine-packed with delightful rhymes. The title, lifted from Walt Whitman, is played off against blood feuds, painted nudes, Bowie’s “all the young dudes” and Chopin preludes – although the games come with menaces. Dylan warns: “I’ll sell you down the river, I’ll put a price on your head/ What more can I tell you?/ I sleep with life and death in the same bed/ Get lost, madame, get up off my knee/ Keep your mouth away from me…”

Death shifts from the “madame” of “Multitudes” to assume the form of a bounty hunter on the flamenco-flecked “Black Rider”. “Tell me when, tell me how,” asks the old gunslinger, “If there ever was a time then let it be now/ Let me go through, open the door/ My soul is distressed, my mind is at war.”

I have a tendency to be irked by floor-pacing repetitions of barroom blues. Those Dylan offers here – “False Prophet”, “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” and “Crossing the Rubicon” – contain the restless ghosts of old 45s spun on his Theme Time Radio Hour. They do add texture. But with so little happening in the melodies I prefer the tracks where the music remains an acoustic backdrop. I loved the horizon-wide breaths of accordion sustaining the dreamlike “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”. This song finds Dylan’s voice – once described by Joyce Carol Oates as “sandpaper singing” – sounding wonderfully bleached and cracked. Like something Tom Waits left out in the sun. It’s warm and wise as the singer quotes Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness”.

Dylan ended his Nobel lecture reminding us that: “Songs are alive.” It’s true. Most of these new ones have a soft and sleepy pulse, although the blood flowing through them reflects difficult times and a difficult man. They’re equal parts finger-pointing and forgiveness. At a time of polarised debates, there’s real consolation in Dylan’s easy-going embrace of his contradictions and complexity.

Rating 5/5

Helen Brown - Friday 19 June 2020
www.independent.co.uk



DOES BOB DYLAN HAVE a wizened Romani palm reader on call? His timing is uncanny. In the midst of a global pandemic, he’s released a new album – his first collection of new compositions in eight years. It’s not merely the novelty of new Bob songs that offers comfort in this black swan moment, it’s a set of songs that provides inspiration when it’s in short supply. Call it a vaccine against culture’s shrinking expectations and the subsequent sapping of spirit. or just call it great music.

The unifying theme for his 39th studio album is that Homo sapiens are a rough and rowdy species: self-destructive at our worst, wired for survival and transcendence at our best. In Mother of Muses he gives credit for creative spark to General George Patton, Elvis Presley and Martin Luther King as “heroes who stood alone”, while I Contain Multitudes is a solemn litany of our strengths and weaknesses: Anne Frank, Beethoven and William Blake; bling, blood feuds, and “British bad boys, The Rolling Stones.”

Tinged with Dylan’s wry wit, loping blues-rocker False Prophet can be heard as virtue signalling from a braggart in the midst of an attempted seduction. Or perhaps responses from a man who’s been endlessly labelled by those attached to pedestals and finite definition. Key West (Philosopher Pirate) begins as paean to the southernmost tip of Florida, but turns into a bizarre tale worthy of Tennessee Williams.

My Own Version Of You is a wishful recreation of another person by the protagonist, implying the projection we employ when we have expectations for others. Or, at its most literal, it might be Dylan’s variation on Bride Of Frankenstein. These beguiling layers are the stuff of endless debate – Dylan fans have revelled in them since he first blew in the wind. What are these songs ultimately about? About six to nine minutes.

Likewise, the gorgeous I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You is, on the surface, a surrender-to-love ballad framed with tremulous, understated background “oohs”. But when Dylan sings, “If I had the wings of a snow white dove/I’d preach the gospel/The gospel of love,” it’s possible the object of affection may be no mere mortal. Either way, the vulnerable lead vocal is a refutation of the myth that he can no longer nail pure melody.

The 17-minute elegy and album closer Murder Most Foul was first streamed in March – the initial indication that there was a new album. Here Dylan’s immersed in the Kennedy assassination (another black swan event), laying out the details of a royal murder that’s presented as the terrible results of a power grab. It rivals Shakespeare for grisly description and adds intimations from conspiracy theories, all layered over a stately arrangement. Then in the last seven minutes, he sings dozens of names of music and film icons, song and movie titles and cultural touchstones, all pointing to the artist’s role in providing redemption in the process of enduring tragedy. It’s one of Dylan’s most powerful statements in a long career full of them.

In his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan wrote of his close study of the Civil War: “If you turned the light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature.” The same can be said of Rough And Rowdy Ways; “I can see the history of the whole human race,” he sings in My Own Version Of You. For all the men and women of noble accomplishment that get namechecked, he also cites criminals and adversaries.

As I Contain Multitudes reminds us, Dylan is “a man of contradictions/a man of many moods.” But then, contradiction has always lived comfortably in Bob Dylan’s work – more evidence of the vast scope of his artistic vision. What’s extraordinary is how it continues to expand, containing multitudes no one else thought of.

Rating: 5/5

Michael Simmons - June 13, 2020
MOJO



“I sing the songs of experience like William Blake,” Bob Dylan growls, introducing his 39th epistle on the follies, frustrations and secret strengths of a species at war with itself, “I’ve got no apologies to make.”

He’s the rebel poet, approaching twilight, laying out generations of hard-earned wisdoms with no punches pulled and no regrets. At 79, following a trio of covers albums of American standards largely associated with Sinatra, you might expect Dylan to make a world-worn and contemplative sort of record, but one that had little left to say. Instead, with ‘Rough And Rowdy Ways’, he’s produced arguably his grandest poetic statement yet, a sweeping panorama of culture, history and philosophy peering back through assassinations, world wars, the births of nations, crusades and Biblical myths in order to plot his place in the great eternal scheme.

Rough? Perhaps, but it certainly has the warmth and lustre of the intimate and home-made. And rowdy? Dylan’s sure been rowdier. Even his most recent album, 2012’s celebrated ‘Tempest’ – one of several 21st Century Dylan records hailed a masterpiece and considered the crowning achievement of his later career, until now – relied on a certain barnyard boogie, jump blues, country rock and ragtime swing to tell its tales of old, weird America, Lennon and the tragedy of the Titanic.

With ‘Rough And Rowdy Ways’, he’s moved past such trad-rock frivolities as impetus, melody, chorus, even rhythm in places. Instead he requires of his band just a series of soft and simple canvasses, woven largely from gentle spiritual, lustrous country, Southern blues or gothic Americana – often resembling enclosed, traditionally structured atmospheres rather than songs – onto which he can project his sprawling literary visions of death, degradation and the horrors of history.

From the start, he places himself front and centre. Set to a languorous haze of acoustic, slide guitar and cello, ‘I Contain Multitudes’ is as full and rounded a self-portrait as you could hope for from one of music’s most shrouded and enigmatic legends. “Got a tell-tale heart like Mr Poe,” Dylan purrs in grainy low register as he spills out admissions of vanity, hate, promiscuity, guilt, paranoia, extravagance, rebellion and enduring love, from himself or the array of characters he contains. “I’m a man of contradictions, I’m a man of many moods, I contain multitudes,” he sings – in as much as Louis Armstrong, Tom Waits or a spluttering lawnmower might ‘sing’ – quoting Walt Whitman to evoke his galaxy of internal emotions.

There’s a closing-book feel to the song that sets a tone for the album, not just in the open-casket hush of the music or the rich lyrical references to a panoply of cultural figures from literary greats to cinematic heroes and rock’n’roll peers – he rhymes “Indiana Jones” with “The Rolling Stones”. It’s in the overt reference to mortality: “Today and tomorrow and yesterday too, the flowers are dyin’ like all things do”. Throughout ‘Rough And Rowdy Ways’, death rides – dark and hoarse.

Over 71 minutes Dylan develops a complex relationship with the Reaper. The steamy Southern blues of ‘False Prophet’ could be read as Bob inhabiting the sharp-cut cowl himself, roaming a godless and greedy world with underworld guides at his side, dispensing justice and revenge on those unworthy of redemption. Then, on the sparse, flamenco-flecked Western noir ‘Black Rider’, death is the caller Dylan’s been warily expecting at his own door: “Tell me when, tell me how,” he calmly intones, “if there ever was a time then let it be now / Let me go through, open the door / My soul is distressed, my mind is at war”.

By ‘Crossing The Rubicon’ – another gritty Southern blues and the only point the album teeters towards the formulaic – he’s making his peace, settling his affairs and preparing to make that irreversible journey “three miles north of Purgatory, one step from the Great Beyond”. The nine-minute ‘Key West (Philosopher Pirate)’, meanwhile, is a rather idyllic deathbed confessional. Over a lustrous country lilt our protagonist recalls a colourful life “born on the wrong side of the railroad track / Like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac”, married at 12 (“she’s still cute and we’re still friends”) and ending up in Heaven’s waiting room at the very bottom of America, filling his final days with gumbo and Hindu rituals.

As much as languid spiritual ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You’ – gorgeous, limpid and brushed by drowsy steel drums – laments those Dylan has lost along the road, he also has fun with mortality. ‘My Own Version Of You’, a sultry vaudevillian blues, finds him robbing graves and morgues for “the necessary body parts” to create a replica of a lost lover, like Victor Frankenstein with a mafia flick fetish: “I’ll take the Scarface Pacino and The Godfather Brando, mix it up in a tank and get a robot commando”. It also morphs into an metaphor for our melting pot culture as Dylan sees Trojan myth, the first crusade, Hamlet, the birth of America, Freud, Marx and Sinatra in the eyes of the monster he’s created: “I can see the history of the whole human race… carved into your face”.

Dylan is famed for his poetic allegories and allusive lyricism, but the sheer breadth of cultural and historical scope he pulls off on ‘Rough And Rowdy Ways’ must surely make this his Ulysses, not least because you’d break Wikipedia trying to unpack it all.

Dots are connected between America’s God-fearing traditions and the lure of ‘50s delta blues on ‘Goodbye Jimmy Reed’ (a legendary Mississippi bluesman), to illuminate how raw humanity clashes with religious strictures. The mournful military tattoo ‘Mother Of Muses’ lowers its cap for the US generals from the Civil War to WWII who “cleared the path for Presley to sing, who carved the path for Martin Luther King”. Religion, music, war and civil rights are all part of the same broad tapestry; Dylan just pulls at the threads to see what unravels.

It all culminates in the evocative 17-minute epic poem ‘Murder Most Foul’, so eminent within the album and such an ambitious culmination of Dylan’s life’s work that it’s given its own CD on the physical version. Delivered with the piano ambience and glacial melancholy of Lou Reed and John Cale’s ‘Songs For Drella’, it places the JFK assassination at the core of the modern America’s dilemma: “The day that they killed him,” Dylan sighs, the weight of the modern world on his tongue, “Someone said to me, ‘Son / The age of the Antichrist has just only begun’.”

The roots of the erosion of US democracy plays out against a backdrop of counter-culture revolution. Between flickering scenes from Dealey Plaza and Parkland hospital, Dylan widens the shot to take in the birth of rock’n’roll, The Beatles, Woodstock and Altamont, before unleashed a bombardment of musical, cinematic and social references stretching the entire 20th Century, like ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ grew up and got a degree. Bluesmen, silent movie clowns, soul queens, jazz greats, rockers, hippies and pin-ups – Dylan revels in a hundred years of creative progress as if in accusation of America’s immutable ideological savagery. JFK, he’s saying, was just the highest profile, on-camera bloodstain to be splashed across the stars and stripes.

“The song is like a painting, you can’t see it all at once if you’re standing too close,” Dylan recently told The New York Times, “the individual pieces are just part of a whole.” As such, it’s a vision of which DeLillo, Picasso or Eliot would be proud, and serves as a fitting close on a record that aspires to be the musical equivalent of the Great American Novel. It would be foolish indeed to assume that ‘Rough And Rowdy Ways’ is Dylan’s last word, but it’s certainly a historic address.

Rating 5/5

Mark Beaumont - 15th June 2020
NME Music Review



Another apocalypse; another side of Bob Dylan. The man really knows how to pick his moments. Dylan has brilliantly timed his new masterwork for a summer when the hard rain is falling all over the nation: a plague, a quarantine, revolutionary action in the streets, cities on fire, phones out of order. Rough and Rowdy Ways is his first batch of new songs in 8 years, and it’s an absolute classic—it has the bleak majesty of latter-day Dylan albums like Modern Times and Tempest, yet it goes beyond them, tapping even deeper into cosmic American mysteries.

You can hear all the rolling thunder in his 79-year-old voice—as he sings in a catch-your-breath moment from “Mother of Muses,” “I’ve already outlived my life by far.” But the man offers no words of comfort—he just spins these outlaw tales with the cold-blooded wit and sardonic passion that keeps him pressing on. As he declares early on the album, “I’ll pick a number between one and two / And ask myself what would Julius Caesar do?”

Dylan gave his first taste of the new music with his 17-minute epic “Murder Most Foul,” which he dropped as a midnight surprise in late March, the early weeks of the pandemic, a few end-of-the-world meltdowns ago. It sets the tone for the whole album—a hallucination of American history as a jukebox, a late-night musical tour of the Desolation Row where we find ourselves right now. All over Rough and Rowdy Ways, he mixes up Chicago blues, Nashville twang, Memphis rock & roll. His voice sounds marvelously nimble and delicate, whether he’s preaching doom, pitching woo, or cracking jokes like “I’ll take the Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando / Mix ‘em up in a tank and get a robot commando.”

The singing here is a revelation—Dylan still busts out the gruff Howlin’ Wolf snarl he perfected on Tempest, but he sounds far more loose and limber, full of finesse. In raw blues stomps like “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” “False Prophet,” and “Beyond the Rubicon,” he’s a master of deadpan comic timing; in ballads like “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” he’s all breathy calm. His past few records were covers of old-time standards, inspired by crooners like Frank Sinatra—doing those songs live, he’d even dip the microphone stand way down low, Ole Blue Eyes-style. His crooner albums were delightful on their own terms. But in retrospect, he was using those records as vocal workshops, figuring out how to do fresh tricks with a new fucked-up voice, just as he did on his two early-Nineties albums of folk-blues covers. So now he revels in how fierce and tender he can sound with sixty years of road dust in his lungs.

Dylan spends the album rambling through hard times all through the land, in portraits of rovers, gangsters, thieves, sinners. As he warns, these songs take place “three miles north of Purgatory, one step from the great beyond.” “My Own Version Of You” is a “Bride of Frankenstein” fantasy with Dylan as a mad scientist, assembling a creature in his lab out of stolen body parts. He promises his creation, “I’ll gonna make you play the piano like Leon Russell / Like Liberace–like St. John the Apostle.” In the sinister “Crossing the Rubicon,” he sneers, “I’ll cut you up with a crooked knife, Lord, and I’ll miss you when you’re gone.” When Dylan observes that it’s darkest right before the dawn—not the first time this weatherman has made that point—he follows with a throwaway “oh god” that can really chill your bones.

“Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” is the highlight from an album full of highlights: a poignant 9-minute accordion noir about an old desperado heading off to Florida to make his last stand, brooding over the end times, with only his radio as a reminder of the life he left behind. His Key West is a poison paradise, where “the fishtail palms and the orchid trees / They can give you that bleeding-heart disease.” He requests a song, asking his radio to give up the Sixties soul oldie “Rescue Me,” as if the song is his last chance to jolt himself into remembering how it felt to have any inspiration left in his heart. As he murmurs, “Key West is fine and fair / If you lost your mind, you’ll find it there.” It conjures up the elegiac vibe of Robert De Niro at the end of The Irishman.

“Murder Most Foul” ends the album with a boom—the song was already powerful as a stand-alone single, but it hits even harder as the finale here. The title comes from Hamlet, on an album where Dylan also drops references to Richard III, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. (“I dig Shakespeare,” he said in March 1966. “A raving queen and a cosmic amphetamine brain.”) “Murder Most Foul” takes on the JFK assassination, but the historical background is just the cue for a song that aims much wider. Like John Wesley Hardin, Lenny Bruce, Blind Willie McTell, Isis, or St. Augustine, JFK is just a mythical folk hero who inspires Dylan to go off in a new story of his own. He uses Kennedy as a departure point for a long fever-dream ramble through cultural memory, sending a prayer out to the DJ, like a cross between Walt Whitman and Wolfman Jack. Dylan ends the song with a long roll call of musical legends: John Lee Hooker, Etta James, Thelonius Monk, Dickey Betts, Bud Powell, Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks. He also salutes his original rock & roll idol Little Richard, in an accidentally timely farewell.

Like so many of the past decade’s finest songs about the country—Lana Del Rey’s “The Greatest,” Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta,” Nick Cave’s “Higgs Boson Blues”—it’s a litany of cherished national myths and icons falling apart. But for Dylan, the only vision of America that still makes sense is a swirl of half-remembered songs across the radio dial, long after midnight. “Murder Most Foul” is a song about how people turn to music for solace, in times of turmoil. But it’s also a song about how the music is part of the turmoil.

As Dylan pushes 80, his creative vitality remains startling—and a little frightening. (Light a candle for the late Leonard Cohen: he no longer owns the crown for the best album ever made by a 79-year-old.) Dylan never stays in one spot too long; hell, it took a global pandemic to put a pause on his Never Ending Tour. But he refuses to rest on his legend. While the world keeps trying to celebrate him as an institution, pin him down, cast him in the Nobel Prize canon, embalm his past, this drifter always keeps on making his next escape. On Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan is exploring terrain nobody else has reached before—yet he just keeps pushing on into the future.

ROB SHEFFIELD - rollingstone.com



A word of advice: Don’t mess with Bob Dylan, who, at 79, rips, snorts and cackles through his new “Rough and Rowdy Ways” album like a man with something — or absolutely nothing — to prove.

Here he is threatening to make somebody’s wife a widow; there he is promising to bring vengeance on somebody’s head. In one song he tells a guy, “I’ll take a sword and hack off your arm,” before adding in unprintable language that the size of the guy’s manhood will get him nowhere — a genuine shock (and a genuine delight) to hear from a Nobel laureate.

Then there’s “My Own Version of You,” a “Frankenstein”-like phantasmagoria that opens with these incredible couplets:

All through the summers into January
I’ve been visiting morgues and monasteries
Looking for the necessary body parts
Limbs and livers and brains and hearts

The tough talk is hardly new for Dylan, whose genius has run neck-and-neck with his nastiness for the half-century in which he’s been rock’s most revered singer-songwriter (and as often as not resented it). “Tempest,” from 2012, was particularly wet with gore — “I got dogs could tear you limb from limb,” he growled in “Pay in Blood” — that suggested he’d found nothing in his deepening study of history to inspire any optimism about the future.

Yet “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” his first album of new material in eight years, due June 19, is more mischievous than mean-spirited. Perhaps this is the aftereffect of the years Dylan spent burrowing into his love of Frank Sinatra and the Great American Songbook across three albums of cover songs (one of them a 30-track behemoth) released between 2015 and 2017. Obviously, he’s no crooner; in most of his new songs, his voice is a brutally ravaged wheeze.

But you can detect a bit of Sinatra’s playfulness in Dylan’s spry delivery here — the clear enjoyment Sinatra took in portraying roguish smoothies and silver-tongued thugs. “Go home to your wife / Stop visiting mine,” he sneers over the last-wine-bar-on-Earth guitar of “Black Rider,” “One of these days I’ll forget to be kind.” He’s glowering and winking at the same time.

It’s a funny moment, of course, for a (relatively) funny record. Were it not for the COVID-19 pandemic, Dylan’s so-called Never Ending Tour would be winding its way toward the Hollywood Bowl for a show next week. And the police killing of George Floyd has only darkened the country’s mood.

“It sickened me no end to see George tortured to death like that,” Dylan told the New York Times in a recent phone interview from his home in Malibu. (Asked how he’s been faring in quarantine, the singer said he’s been painting and welding a bit, which actually makes it even harder to imagine how Bob Dylan keeps himself amused all day.)

But as always Dylan’s not worried about reflecting the times; he’s taking the long view on an album stuffed with names and totems from the past. Most notably, there’s “Murder Most Foul,” the 17-minute-long epic that first appeared as a surprise single in March in which he traces the twisted meanings of the Kennedy assassination — not an uncomplicated event, as it happens, in the troubled story of American race relations.

“Mother of Muses” ponders the motives of various well-known military figures “and the battles they fought”; “I Contain Multitudes,” which Dylan called “trance writing,” quotes one of Walt Whitman’s famous verses and name-drops Anne Frank.

He also appears to have nature on his mind — lots of references to weather and seasons and flowers, as in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” where he’s got more swagger-ific bars about blooming bougainvillea — along with sex: “I break open your grapes / I suck out the juice,” he sings, practically licking his lips, in “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” while his panting delivery in “Crossing the Rubicon” somehow makes that one feel even dirtier.

“Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” which toasts — and mimics — the influential bluesman, is far from the only song here in which Dylan pays tribute to a musician; he also mentions Leon Russell, Etta James, Thelonious Monk, Patsy Cline, the Eagles (!), Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones, with whom he seemed embarrassed to have been roped into Desert Trip (a.k.a. Oldchella) a few years ago. But maybe winning that Nobel eased any remaining worries about being viewed the wrong way.

Speaking of music, nobody’s gets less attention than Dylan’s from word-obsessed critics. Yet “Rough and Rowdy Ways” rolls out one marvel after another, with killer playing from the singer’s road band, which as of last fall counts Matt Chamberlain on drums and Bob Britt on guitar alongside Dylan’s trusty old hands. (A spokesman for the singer said the album carried no producer credit, though his last few were produced by Dylan under the pseudonym Jack Frost.)

“False Prophet” and “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” are gloriously scuzzy roadhouse stomps; “My Own Version of You” and “Crossing the Rubicon” creep along on grooves you can smell. And though Dylan spends most of the album moaning and croaking in a mock-villainous mode, a couple of cuts are almost staggeringly pretty, not least “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” which couldn’t come closer to embodying the scene he sets at the top of the song: “I’m sitting on my terrace, lost in the stars / Listening to the sounds of the sad guitars.”

The music makes you want to believe his wee-small-hours act; the devilish catch in his voice reminds you to think twice.

MIKAEL WOODPOP - JUNE 12, 2020
Los Angeles Times Online



Rough and Rowdy Ways is the 39th studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on June 19, 2020 by Columbia Records. It is Dylan's first album of original songs since his 2012 album Tempest, following three releases, one a triple album, that covered traditional pop standards. It features contributions from several musicians, including Fiona Apple, Benmont Tench and Alan Pasqua. The album was preceded by the singles "Murder Most Foul", "I Contain Multitudes" and "False Prophet". Rough and Rowdy Ways was universally praised by critics, and was described as one of Dylan's best works. It peaked at No. 1 in more than ten countries and No. 2 in the United States and Australia.

On March 27, 2020, the single "Murder Most Foul" was released unannounced, Dylan's first original song distributed since 2012. On April 17, 2020, "I Contain Multitudes", a second single, was released. Rough and Rowdy Ways was officially announced on May 8, 2020. Rough and Rowdy Ways was released as a double album, with the entirety of the second CD and the entirety of the last side of the vinyl edition dedicated to "Murder Most Foul". The album's third single, "False Prophet", was released on the same day. On June 11, 2020, Bob Dylan's YouTube channel revealed the full tracklist.

Rough and Rowdy Ways was met with widespread critical acclaim. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from professional critics, the album received an average score of 95, based on 22 reviews. Reviewing for The Daily Telegraph in June 2020, Neil McCormick hailed the album as "one long, magnificent ride for his most loyal fans" and declared, "The wise old poet has stirred up a cryptic cauldron of truths and clues, philosophy, myths and magic." Anne Margaret Daniel, reviewing for Hot Press, said "Rough and Rowdy Ways is a record we need right now, and it will endure." Mikael Wood, in the Los Angeles Times, said the album "rolls out one marvel after another." Writing for Slate, Carl Wilson called the release Dylan's best in "many years, maybe decades" for the breadth of its cultural references and the depth of Dylan's lyrics and songwriting. Jon Pareles, chief music critic for The New York Times, labeled the album a "Critic's Pick," describing its songs as "equal parts death-haunted and cantankerous," rivaling "the grim, gallows-humored conviction of his albums Time Out of Mind (1997) and Love and Theft (2001)." Writing for The Telegraph India, Jaimin Rajani said this release brings respite and diversity. Ken Tucker of NPR's Fresh Air gave the release a positive review for its musical diversity. In his Substack-published "Consumer Guide" column, Robert Christgau said that the album's impact is "muffled" by some "indistinct" songs, namely "Black Rider" and "I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You", but declared, "The decisive musical achievement on Dylan's first album of originals since 2012 is establishing the aged voice that flubbed his Sinatra albums as the sonic signature of an elegiac retrospective."

The album debuted at number 2 on the US Billboard 200 with 53,000 units, Dylan's highest-charting album in more than a decade. It marked his seventh consecutive decade of charting top 40 albums.

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