- In 1965, folk troubadour, Bob Dylan released the six-minute rock epic, Like A Rolling Stone. Now regarded as one of the greatest songs of all time, Columbia records were apprehensive to release the song due to its unconventional length and sound. Fifty-five years on, not much has changed in the conventionality department. On 26th March 2020, Dylan released the seventeen-minute track, Murder Most Foul. Ever the visionary, Dylan still manages to find new trails to blaze. With his latest release, Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan continues to astound with an album that is only his latest in a career laden with masterpieces.
Famous for his verbose songwriting, at 79, Dylan still shows no signs of running out of things to say. Despite his loquacious tendencies, he wastes no time getting to the crux of the matter, opening the album with the arresting first line, “Today and tomorrow and yesterday too / The flowers are dying like all things do”. The track, I Contain Multitudes takes its name from the Walt Whitman poem, Song of Myself and is one of many on the album which reference death. Along with the sepulchral Black Rider, where the narrator speaks to one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, moribund lyrics are ubiquitous. However, on third track, My Own Version of You, Dylan does the opposite, as he describes bringing someone to life. While his writing is often loaded with meaning, Dylan shows he’s still capable of puerility with the line, “I pick a number between one and two / And ask myself what would Julius Caesar do?”. Five tracks later, Dylan picks up the thread again on Crossing the Rubicon, referencing the tribulations of Caesar as he crossed the famous river with the thirteenth Legion and declared war on the Roman nobility in 49 B.C.. The song still flirts with mortality in the line, “Three miles north of purgatory / One step from the great beyond”.
While there are lyrical threads that tie the album together, each number is made distinctive by its constituents. Fourth track, I’ve Made Up Mind to Give Myself to You, is a brilliant love song that shows off Dylan’s sentimental songwriting chops, whilst blues rocker, Goodbye Jimmy Reed is as rollicking as anything off Highway 61 Revisited. Penultimate track, Key West (Philosopher’s Pirate) is a melancholic epic and standout track that sounds like a maritime classic with its undulating accordion and echoing guitars. Technically a double album, Rough and Rowdy Ways only has just one song on its second side and you get no points for guessing, yes, it's that seventeen-minute monolith, Murder Most Foul. Dylan’s longest ever tune (no small feat), it is simply a masterpiece. Panoramic in its scope, featuring a cornucopia of cultural references, the title is derived from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and focuses on the assassination of former US President John F. Kennedy. In what may be the legend’s final song and album, it justifies why Bob Dylan is the only songwriter to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and why he is unequivocally the greatest lyricist of all time.
- Jon Cloumassis.