'I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones': Bob Dylan continues return to new songs
Bob Dylan has continued to release his first original music in eight years, with a song in which he seemingly compares himself to Anne Frank, Indiana Jones, the Rolling Stones and William Blake.
At four and a half minutes, I Contain Multitudes is less lengthy than the song he returned with, Murder Most Foul, a 17-minute long track about the JFK assassination. Like that song, though, I Contain Multitudes is drifting and percussion-free, backed by acoustic, electric and pedal steel guitars.
The 78-year-old songwriter announced it with a hashtag-strewn tweet: “#today and #tomorrow, #skeletons and #nudes, #sparkle and #flash, #AnneFrank and #IndianaJones, #fastcars and #fastfood, #bluejeans and #queens, #Beethoven and #Chopin, #life and #death.”
I Contain Multitudes lays out a wry but proud assessment of his own songwriting and personality. In one verse he sings:
Elsewhere he compares himself to gothic writer Edgar Allen Poe, while another line says “I rollick and I frolic with all the young dudes”, a reference to David Bowie’s song All the Young Dudes. Violence and death fringe the apparently calm mood, too: “I carry four pistols and two large knives … I sleep with life and death in the same bed”.
Dylan’s return to original songwriting comes after three covers albums, Shadows in the Night (2015), Fallen Angels (2016) and the triple album Triplicate (2017). The songs are his first new work since winning the Nobel prize for literature in 2016.
Murder Most Foul was critically acclaimed on its release last month, with the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis heralding its “dense and intriguing lyrics … musically, it’s unlike anything Dylan has done before”. Rolling Stone also praised it, saying it is “about the ways that music can comfort us in times of national trauma”.