Paul G, Devon
Sometimes, it’s good to sit on the porch with ol’ Bob. He was quite the hurricane back in the day, but now he likes to sip whiskey and tell tales, some of them tall enough. He knew some fine and beautiful women, and he talks tenderly, as if they were still beautiful even now. He’s sailed some stormy seas, been up that creek without a paddle, and he has some old-time wisdom to impart. But he wraps it up in smoke and wind, , though, so you never can tell whether you’ve been tricked or treated. It just annoys the hell out of some people. I can’t take the way he sings, but I love to hear him talk.
Paul Barrow, St Albans
This is a triumphant performer’s album. The vocal cadences and rhythms, the hesitations and delays, the foregrounding and entropy all add up to a magnificent and, to be honest, unexpected development of his singular take on the musical traditions he has been working in for decades. Rough and Rowdy Ways [RARW] is like nothing he’s created before – comparisons to previous albums, especially those in his renaissance golden age post-1997, are pointless. As ever, there is a deft precision with language; the confidently understated vocal delivery (maybe with the exception of Key West) clearly shows the period of American Songbook covers was not for nothing. Beneath it all is some exquisite music (has Charlie Sexton ever played guitar so well?), which helps define the melodies Dylan eschews in a true blues manner. There is simply no one like him who is producing music of this quality, challenging us, framing a view of the world you just have to take seriously. A performer’s masterpiece, and to do it at almost 80 years old. Dylan continues to bring such joy to my life.
Wayne, London
For me Dylan is like an old girlfriend: beautiful and engaging, who took you travelling down the open roads. Then you hear she’s back in town. You go to the bar, keeping to the shadows to catch a glimpse and it’s like watching your granny pole-dancing. You leave, sadder, wiser. Crossing the Rubicon took me to Tower of Song, and with Leonard I remained.
Kyle Evans, Southampton
Oh it’s good alright, but hard to tell how good because there’s no precedent for it. We have a man of almost 80 years speaking about the human condition in ways that pop music hasn’t seen before. Look at other elder statesmen to have bothered the upper ends of the chart – Rod Stewart, Tony Bennett, Tom Jones, even Vera Lynn! – all with collaborative or retrospective work. Dylan sounds nothing like he has in the past. I want to hear what music he’ll be making at 100.
Peter Higginson, Wolverhampton
This album has been bigged up by professional critics over the age of 50, but they are all closet fans. A true reading of the album reveals that it is pretty slapdash, has no real purpose or form, is melodically weak and derivative, and lyrically shallow. All the songs are about Dylan himself, who promises to contain multitudes on the album’s opener but can only do so in a titular way, name-checking icons from a random past and developing no ideas or insights beyond two lines. The Dylan who speaks the songs (they are barely sung) is, of course, the famous Wanted Man from 1969, who has been so famous for so long that every word he speaks is hung on to like a papal encyclical to be interpreted and applied in the lives of the faithful for years to come. But he also has a half-hearted line in using personae so that he can pretend none of the songs are really about himself. If he contains multitudes, it is only in a shallow sense. This is indeed a shallow album. A shallow grave.
John Carvill, Manchester
It’s impossible to express in words the strength of my feeling for this album. It has surpassed my expectations by several orders of magnitude. Sure, the reviews were universal raves, but you never know until you see (or hear) for yourself. In fact, the 5 star reviews actually undersold this record. This isn’t the patchy, posturing Tempest, or the bloated, turgid Modern Times. No, this is a real Dylan album, his best since Love and Theft; indeed, many of the songs here would not disgrace that masterpiece, which is really saying something. I also hear echoes of Highway 61 Revisited. That said, it’s unique in the Dylan canon, in all of popular music in fact. Musically varied, lyrically rich, strange, and fascinating. It’s funny; it’s sad. It rocks; it mesmerises. It excites; it soothes. Feels like a continuation, but also a culmination. Key West will join the pantheon of great, late Bob, up there with Red River Shore, Mississippi, Trying to Get to Heaven, Highlands, etc. By the time you get about halfway through Murder Most Foul, you’re practically tripping. Blessed are we to be living in the Dylan era. Everything else in popular music is just dust beneath the soles of his Cuban heeled boots. Mind blowing. I was in tears this morning when I first played this CD. What else can anyone say? Thanks, Bob – once again you have enhanced our lives.
Dylan, UK
The Amazon drone shot this contact-free through my letter box this morning. Pouring a large glass of Johnnie Walker Blue and settling back and diving in. Bob is still very funny. My Own Version of You is Mary Shelley recast as Edgar Allan Poe in a creepy midnight graveyard somewhere down south. False Prophet is an angry Trump takedown, and there’s bluesy streams of consciousness and leaps of urban poetry. There’s sundown romance and a ragged charm. And the usual quota of Dylanesque one-liners. His band, seasoned by a thousand nights on the road, fit him like a well-worn black coat. He’s still driving through that old weird America. Rough and rowdy, but in true style.
Matthew Mansell, Birmingham
Those cover albums weren’t for naught. Some of the Frank Sinatra charm rubbed off – “You don’t know me darling, you never would guess,” he flirts at one point. He can’t croon, but he can rasp with style. The instrumentation flutters around him, letting the words breathe. This isn’t Bob the poet, this is Bob the entertainer having fun with his own legacy. A joy.
Tom Harding, Northampton
As a self-confessed Dylanologist, I am very happy with this record. For those paying attention, Dylan has been busy for some time creating, or perhaps curating, a new language of expression. The incessant inter-textualisation of pop culture allusions and literature, the love and, often blatant, theft of pre-war blues, Japanese pulp novels, civil war poets, New Orleans travel guides, and frankly anything not tied down. A means to solve a dilemma of how you still write great songs when admittedly you can’t quite do it as freewheelingly as you used to. Allen Ginsberg once questioned Dylan as to whether he worried about being hung one day as a thief but it has clearly never bothered Dylan. Over time it’s become clear the theft was part of the the act itself. A means of expression to which Rough and Rowdy Ways might be the most exquisite artefact to date.
Here the whole of human history is on the chopping block. Anne Frank sits beside Indiana Jones and Martin Luther King beside Calliope. All of time recycled, regurgitated, reborn and lurching into life with grace and violence of the De Niro/Brando robot commando from My Own Version of You. It’s a book of answers but not to all questions. Is this a political record? What does he think about Trump? Or the pandemic? This record isn’t about one terrible person or one terrible time but instead about all people and all time. A map of the human condition in all its complexities and shadow and delights. A reminder of our multitudes, our tributaries, rivers and ravines. In a time of polarisation, truth-twisting and binary debate, it’s liberating.
In double good news, the record sounds great: warm and intimate with just enough reverb to let those Dylanesque lines linger, delivered in that knowable and unknowable, Mona Lisa-esque, both deadpan and expressive delivery, that lingers with you days, months, years afterwards. For those of us who care (perhaps a little too much), it’s a rich velvety stew that will sustain us for some time. However, there’s enough here for anyone that listens, all of life even, rough and rowdy, and impossible to ignore.
Mike, New Zealand
This record is a line in the metaphorical sand. What we are all lucky enough to be hearing is a serious intellect at work here, a very big brain sold to us all as “a simple song and dance man”. This may in one way be the most accurate description of Bob Dylan, but for mine, who else could have the high prose and music chops to cut through the ever thickening fog of this tormented world and show us despair and hope so openly in a single musical setting. There isn’t another recording artist alive who has laid down art their own way for so long and so magnificently. There will never be another quite like this man, so let’s sit back and bask in the wonder of this record, an artist, the real song and dance man, at the top of his game – the game –again.
Robert Tombs, Ottawa
He’s stayed true to his values throughout his career, from Blowing in the Wind and With God on Our Side, to Lenny Bruce and Murder Most Foul. He didn’t sell his soul to gain greater advantage. With a recording career that spans almost 60 years, and contains numerous masterpieces, this is an uncommon achievement. On Rough and Rowdy Ways, his fusing of insightful language within a variety American song traditions – blues, jazz, spoken word, swing – advocates for a cold, hard look at the injustices of everything from lost love to failed states. Murder Most Foul, his longest song ever, strips misinformation from the mythology of the Kennedy assassination, implicating a small cabal of plotters, and functions as a kind of metaphor for the corrupt and crumbling America of today. This is an extraordinary use of his notoriety.
Jubby Taylor, Sheffield
His songwriting is like a billboard with 50 years of layers. Showing through the parts that have fallen away are the many things that have been before, the analogues of history, references to the past and the seeds for the future. It’s songwriting in the most collage way possible and it’s great.
Suann Harris, Sunrise Beach, Texas
I had listened to three tracks and knew this would be a powerful album. Then I found out the release date to be Juneteenth. By then I was giddy because of the timing. Three weeks ago, I completely lost my mind in grief and rage. OK, so here’s what I think about Rough and Rowdy Ways: a masterpiece and, once more, he expresses how I feel, which helps me wrestle with these worst of times.
Brandon Brotherton, Denton, Texas
This is as comfortable as he’s ever sounded. Even the blues stomps are loose and easygoing. It’s his goal of having the past, present and future all in the same place, fully realised. He’s done with being lovesick, resigned to building his own version. Even the love songs (such as I’ve Made Up Mind to Give Myself to You) seem to be more about life on the road than a commitment to a newly found relationship. The singing is as good as it’s been since Time Out of Mind. I wasn’t all that interested in his recent run of covers records, but it obviously inspired a softness in his vocal approach and, with the music, it gives off a feeling of continuous drift. In the end, he’s content sitting on the beach, watching it all burn.
Christy Matthews, Ringwood
It’s his best writing in years. Bob Dylan writes like he’s 1,000 years old. He’s in the pantheon. This is Shakespeare after his Tempest. He’s gone a step further into song, more expansive, and wider. He said he wrote it like “trance writing” or something like that, like he wrote before his accident in 1966. Key West is elsewhere, somewhere ahead and after, he’s speaking from somewhere and sending back something. And his voice! It’s clear and expressive and very briefly vulnerable. The musicians sustain this beautiful mood without overstepping, and there’s so much love in it.
John Hurrell, Auckland
The great new songs here are – as literature – a mixture of (blended) John Ashbery-like textual collages and a librarian’s shopping list of books and CDs; the violently vivid narratives hinting at Joseph Conrad and Larry Brown. What is more fascinating is the restrained “background” music which continues from what Dylan presented in his recorded Nobel prize speech, while his confident phrasing (and recording technique: its new intimacy) seems to have developed from what he learned doing the Sinatra covers. Overall, a glorious concoction that is an achievement for any artist of any age living at any time.
Bennett Freed, Los Angeles
Much like the release date of Love and Theft, which was released on September 11, 2001 and uncannily mentioned a “sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down” in its song Mississippi, the release of Bob Dylan’s new album is uncanny. With everything blowing in the wind from a corrupt presidency, to a pandemic raging through the country to Black Lives Matter protests against systemic racism and murder, nothing less than the soul of America is up for grabs and will be decided in the US election in November. With this as the background, Bob Dylan releases his new music into the social maelstrom that is 2020. Prophet. Poet. Musician and Nobel laureate. Don’t miss it.
Niall Brennan, York
“The killing frost is on the ground and autumn leaves are gone”: a simple line from this new record that contains the proverbial multitudes. Time rolls on, there are threats from every corner, and all we can do is stand, or make our stand. But as any Dylan fan knows, the words dig deeper than that: Autumn Leaves, the standard performed with such delicacy by Dylan in recent years; the poetry of Robert Frost, and those roads less travelled; Howlin’ Wolf’s savage, primal Killin’ Floor.
Dylan’s best work of recent years offers paths into older works of song and literature and history, and this new record, with its singular unity of purpose presents a world where Frankenstein creates his monster, Caesar founds his empire, and Whitman crafts his epic poetry all at the same time, and all for the same reasons: either immortality or stubbornness. Dylan has always been masterful at combining the imagery of the old west with that of the New Testament, but with this work he has succeeded in bringing it all back to the classics, and all the way up to the great American novel, where the story of a new empire can be told through the tale of those who struggle within it: “That’s my story, but not where it ends, she’s still cute, and we’re still friends,” Dylan tells us as the utterly gorgeous Key West comes to a close. Simple words and simple language again suggesting something far larger, far more multitudinous. This album is a quiet, humble masterpiece from an artist at the peak of his powers.
Rob Jones, Nuneaton
I have a theory that all the rock dad guys from way back release some ignorable stuff in their 50s and 60s, but when they are nearing the winter of their life, they knock it out of the park. Bowie with Blackstar, Leonard Cohen with You Want It Darker, even Springsteen with Western Stars (although I hope that doesn’t mean we’ll be losing him any time soon); the closer to death, the better it gets. This is definitely what we’ve received from Dylan this time. Doing what he wants for a few years recording Sinatra standards, he’s pulled his socks up and gifted us this. It’s really great. I just hope my theory means Paul McCartney has another Band on the Run in him.
James Butterfield, Rome
I loved the standards trilogy, unlike many, but still I couldn’t wait for new original material. Murder Most Foul came out of the blue, or should I say out of the darkness of lockdown. Between online appointments one early afternoon I was informed of its existence, and put it on in my 10-minute break. It had me bawling after about 10 minutes, and I had to postpone my appointment and straighten up. I really don’t cry often. But I find that song almost overwhelming every time I hear it. It’s very tasteful to have made it not only the final track of the album, but also a separate CD – it’s the second act of a two-act piece. As for the first act, I’m still digesting it. I’ve already listened to it three times, twice last night on Spotify, before crawling to bed, desperately trying not to awaken my family with my bursting joy and tears. I maintain that Dylan’s genius is not his songs, not his lyrics. It is his voice, his presentation of his worlds. It has changed more times than any musical style or costume of his contemporaries. And now that finally, truly he cannot “sing”, it moves and beguiles me more than ever. When he was a young man, he tried to sound like what a young man thinks an old wise man sounded like. Now he’s old, he doesn’t try to sound wise at all. And that’s what sounds pretty wise to me and ol’ Socrates.
Rory Lavery, Buckinghamshire
When I saw that the Guardian was taking reviews from the public for Bob Dylan’s latest album, I was ecstatic. Finally, my inner agent thought, a chance to break out that dusty literature degree and say something clever. I was going to say something deep, meaningful, heartless about the lost soul and moral decay of America. Yawn. Then I remembered something someone who was actually clever must have told me: good writing comes from the heart. One song from Rough and Rowdy Ways moved my heart. I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You is a beautiful song –and a breath of fresh air. Love songs aren’t hard to come by, but not this kind.
Here Dylan struck my heart with another kind of love. It’s the kind of forgotten love that really makes the world go round: the love that keeps the doctors and nurses checking in day-in, day-out; the love that keeps the food banks open; the love that makes the planets spin; “a love so real, a love so true”. I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You is inspired by a confidence that goes beyond mere logic. In our world of number-crunching, box-ticking, deadline-beating, objective-hitting productivity, why would this kind of love ever need mention? But isn’t this exactly the kind of love we need? A love that says, here I am, and when we ask “but why?” it replies simply: “Just because.”
dylan37
This has been with me all day. Soaking slowly into my memory jukebox, like charred oak in a whiskey barrel. Bob’s recent runs of original albums had some real highlights, but I don’t revisit them all that often. I gave that whole Sinatra thing a miss (if I really want to hear some old feller murdering a standard, I can go to any city-centre boozer at closing time), and I stopped seeing him live about 15 years ago, after another truly, embarrassingly awful 75-minute growl fest. But this is Bob back on familiar territory, with laid-back, well-played bluesy songs, that suit his weathered croak. A tour through a world gone wrong, a rusting Empire Burlesque on the slide, possibly after the misguided election of a false prophet. There’s dark graveyard humour, aching love songs to old flames that still flicker, a long scene by scene musical version of Oliver Stone’s best film mixed in with a flick through Bob’s vinyl collection. It feels like going for a ride in an old Cadillac through an America of Hemingway and Hopper, all the way to Key West, with Howlin’ Wolf and Jimmy Reed on the transistor radio.
• Alexis Petridis: Rough and Rowdy Ways review – a testament to Bob Dylan’s eternal greatness.
