Music Return to Desolation Row
Dylan explores cosmic American mysteries on an album that feels stunningly timely
Bob Dylan explores cosmic American mysteries on a stunningly timely album.
Another apocalypse — another side of Bob Dylan. The man really knows how to pick his moments. Dylan has brilliantly timed his new masterpiece for a summer when the hard rain is falling all over the nation: a plague, a quarantine, revolutionary action in the streets. Rough and Rowdy Ways is his first batch of new songs in eight 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
on “Mother of Muses,” “I’ve already outlived my life by far.” But he offers no words of comfort. He just spins these outlaw tales with the coldblooded wit and fierce passion that keeps him pressing on, as he shrugs, “I’ll pick a number between one and two/And ask myself what would Julius Caesar do?”
Dylan gave his first taste of the album with his 17-minute epic “Murder Most Foul,” which he dropped in the early weeks of the pandemic. 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 — all the music in the American grain. 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.”
“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’m gonna make you play the piano like Leon Russell/Like Liberace — like St. John the Apostle.” In the sinister blues stomp “Crossing the Rubicon,” Dylan warns, “I’ll cut you up with a crooked knife, Lord, and I’ll miss you when you’re gone.” “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” is a nine-minute accordion noir about an aging desperado heading off to Florida for his last stand, with only his radio to remind him of the life he left behind. It conjures the elegiac mood of Robert De Niro at the end of The Irishman.
“Murder Most Foul” ends the album with a boom — he uses the JFK assassination as his departure point for a fever-dream ramble through cultural memory, praying to the DJ with a litany of music legends, like a cross between Walt Whitman and Wolfman Jack. 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 made by a 79-year-old.) It took a pandemic to put a pause on Dylan’s Never Ending Tour. But he refuses to rest on his legend. On Rough and Rowdy Ways, he is exploring terrain nobody else has reached before — yet just keeps pushing on into the future.