It is blues and folk music that seem to drift in and out of consciousness, an in-between-world described in its opening lines: “Today and tomorrow and yesterday, too/The flowers are dying like all things do.” There are obvious reference points for this music as well-Billy “The Kid” Emerson in “False Prophet,” Jimmy Reed in “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”-but the performances are less formal, more impressionistic. As depicted in Daniel Mark Epstein’s book The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait, Dylan kick-started those sessions by playing his bandmates another artist’s “prototype” track to apply to whatever batch of songs he brought to the studio.
![bob dylan discography covers bob dylan discography covers](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a5bb3f9f43b55631dfd9237/1559474535069-5TGIO75HBXS2UY7QB7WQ/rs-146623-d65dcb014f0ce1daaaa2da683fbc98e2f85e0132.jpg)
Its sound is threadbare and hypnotic, backed by small choirs and acoustic instruments, a sharp turn from the raucous blues reenactments of his 21st-century records. Played by his touring band, with understated appearances from Fiona Apple and Blake Mills, the music is a ghostly presence. The lyrics are striking-dense enough to inspire a curriculum, clever enough to quote like proverbs. It results in a gorgeous and meticulous record. There are no distractions he speaks carefully, quietly, earnestly. These twists lead to some memorable lines-and welcomed moments of levity-but his biting, absurdist humor is not the focus. “The size of your cock will get you nowhere,” he grumbles to a sworn enemy, who might be death itself, in “Black Rider.” “I’m the last of the best, you can bury the rest,” he boasts in “False Prophet,” summoning the gnarled lunatic who narrated most of 2012’s Tempest, the voice that seemed to be choking while cursing you for trying to help. The vaudevillian spirit that ran through 2001’s Love and Theft and 2006’s Modern Times is mostly limited to this one song. Among the questions he poses: “Can you tell me what it means: To be or not to be?” “Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?” We never get the answers all we hear is the depravity: slapstick horror rendered as existential comedy. In a macabre narrative called “My Own Version of You,” Dylan sings about playing god as he scavenges through morgues and cemeteries to reanimate a few notable corpses and absorb their knowledge. But for all his allusions to history and literature, the writing drifts toward uncertainty. (In that same Times interview, he is asked whether the coronavirus could be seen as a biblical reckoning-a difficult question to imagine posing to any other living musician.) We have learned to come to Dylan with these types of quandaries, and more often than not, we have left satisfied. Still, he is Bob Dylan, and we are trained to dig deeper. So when he sings about crossing the Rubicon, he’s talking about a river in Italy when he tells you he’s going down to Key West, he wants you to know he’s dressing for the weather. “The lyrics are the real thing, tangible, they’re not metaphors,” Dylan told the New York Times. And love is not a Shakespearean riddle or a lusty joke it is a delicate pact between two people, something you make up your mind and devote yourself to. In these songs, death is not a heavy fog hanging over all walks of life it is a man being murdered as the country watches, an event with a time, place, and date. In other words, it is the rare Dylan album that asks to be understood, that comes down to meet its audience. The rest of the album follows this thread: furnished with more space than his words require, sung gracefully at the age of 79, speaking to things we know to be true, using proper nouns and first-hand evidence.
![bob dylan discography covers bob dylan discography covers](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01383/hiwy61_l965_1383229i.jpg)
“I contain a-multituuudes,” he croons, to anybody who hasn’t realized by now. He compares himself to Anne Frank and Indiana Jones, says he says he’s a painter and a poet, confesses to feeling restless, tender, and unforgiving. But now he’s singing his own words, and about himself. It’s the same twilight atmosphere that comprised Dylan’s last three studio albums, a faithful trilogy of American standards once popularized by Frank Sinatra. It’s a subtle drop there wasn’t much there in the first place-a muted string ensemble, a soft pedal steel, some funereal motifs from classical and electric guitars.
![bob dylan discography covers bob dylan discography covers](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kKxIdYfgMv0/TV97Glu1stI/AAAAAAAABKU/7a8eIhrL0t8/s1600/Bob_Dylan_-_The_Times_They_are_a-Changin.jpg)
Less than a minute into his 39th album, which he has decided to call Rough and Rowdy Ways, the accompaniment seems to fade. But his silence holds just as much meaning. Sometimes breathless, often inscrutable, occasionally prophetic, his words have formed a mythology unto themselves. For 60 years, Bob Dylan has been speaking to us.