Juneteenth New Energy For The World – Dylan’s New One

Bob Dylan Has Given Us One of His Most Timely Albums Ever With ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’; At 79, he’s still channeling cosmic American mysteries like no one else in music

Rob Sheffield, June 15, 2020 (Rolling Stone)

“…[The man who asked how many roads a man must walk down over hlf a centuyryt ago] has brilliantly timed his new masterwork for a summer when the hard rain is falling all over…[with] a plague, a quarantine, revolutionary action in the streets, cities on fire…Rough and Rowdy Ways is his first batch of new songs in 8 years, and it’s an absolute classic…

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…

“…[His 17-minute epic “Murder Most Foul,” dropped in] 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…

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…[He] 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…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…

“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…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 it’s also a song about how the music is part of the turmoil.

… Dylan never stays in one spot too long…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.” click here for more

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