Bob Dylan Contradicts Himself: A Song-By-Song Breakdown of The Ambitious ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’

Last Friday (6/19), Bob Dylan released Rough and Rowdy Ways, his first album of originals since 2012’s Tempest. The album contains blues romps, hymns, dirges, meditations—all forms that allow Dylan to strut his way around the rock’n’roll that previously commanded his attention. As with his previous late-era releases, endless couplets spill from Dylan’s weathered-yet-expressive voice as his lines alternate between romance and violence. All the while he curates a host of historical figures and allusions, intertextual borrowings, and arrangements cribbed from blues musicians and his own weighty catalogue. The resulting album is a grand achievement for an artist of any age, one worthy of a song-by-song breakdown:

“I Contain Multitudes” – This mellow, meditative opening to the album hangs on an allusion to Walt Whitman, the Great American Bard, who in “Song of Myself” wrote, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Dylan cinches his six verses with those final three words in a refrain befitting the bard of American music. His writings, performances, and interviews have proven, as he sings in the song, “I’m a man of contradiction / I’m a man of many moods.” This was the second song Dylan released in the lead up to the new album, before his fans knew for sure the new album was coming (there’d been whispers of it in the making for months). Disparate characters abound, from Edgar Allen Poe to Anne Frank while the speaker “sleep(s) with life and death in the same bed.” The relatively flat melody and harmonically strong chord progression, on any of Dylan’s previous late-era albums, might’ve made this a hair-raising rock song, a la “Pay in Blood.” But during those eight years since Tempest, Dylan undertook a journey through the Great American Songbook, and the fruits of that journey are palpable here. The song becomes a fusion of the crooner style and the Dylan we’ve come to know, by turns mischievous and murderous, coy and blunt. “I Contain Multitudes” is a self-portrait of an artist still vital at 79.

“False Prophet” – This blues romp was the third of three songs released in advance of the album, which gave musicologists time to discover Dylan lifted the arrangement nearly wholesale from Billy “The Kid” Emerson’s 1954 B-side, “If Lovin’ Is Believing.” Surprised? Dylan has been doing as much his entire career, as far back as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” Such borrowing has always been a cornerstone of his creative process. He repurposes music he’s heard; lines from poems and paragraphs and movies make their way into his lyrics. Sometimes he works the source material over so thoroughly that listeners can hardly tell. Other times he leaves it as is, as if daring us to say something. And with the tone of defiance that has slipped into his songwriting in the new millennium, Dylan bragging here “I’m first among equals, second to none / The last of the best, you can bury the rest,” few have confronted him directly on his bluff. Instead, he’s continued to garner scores of followers and accolades, yet he declares, “I ain’t no false prophet / I just know what I know.” This statement does leave open the possibility that Dylan could be a true prophet, or, more likely, no prophet at all. Given his multitudinous approach, listeners may take him both ways.

“My Own Version of You” – Dylan’s ars poetica, his exploration of his own relationship to songwriting: how he does it, and why, and what comes of the endeavor. The first verse of this creeping, stalking tune redolent of “Man in the Long Black Coat” from 1988’s Oh Mercy finds the speaker “Lookin’ for the necessary body parts” because, he says, “I wanna create my own version of you.” Who is the you? Is it the listener? Is it the authors of the source texts, which here include Shakespeare and Bo Diddley? Is it “The whole human race,” whose history Dylan’s speaker can see “carved” into the face of his burgeoning corpse? In that “version of you,” the “you” is the song itself, compacted with all the dramas and verses and lines of dialogue we’ve ever rendered into language. Dylan will bring this “someone to life, someone for real / Someone who feels the way that I feel.” Others’ expressions will become his own, and he appropriately renders his artistic process through another’s story: Frankenstein animating his monster with “one strike of lightning,” “a blast of electricity.” To complete the process, Dylan growls, “show me your ribs, I’ll stick in the knife.” He needs the listener to give something of themselves to complete the work.

“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” – Here’s a love song in 3/4 time. Backup vocalists hum angelically through the intro. A brushed snare along with subtle steel drums lend the song a celestial feel akin to another Oh Mercy track, “Shooting Star.” In fact, the fourth verse begins, “My eye is like a shooting star / It looks at nothing here or there, nothing near or far.” Love songs thrive on metaphors, and here the metaphors range from the starry skies, to “a long road of despair,” to “a river that sings.” But Dylan doesn’t make anything too easy. The sixth of nine verses addresses “a travelin’ man” and says “I’ll go far away from home with her.” Male and female figures emerge while the speaker devotes himself to a “you.” Given that Dylan invokes “the gospel of love” and his speaker “hope(s) that the gods go easy” on him, it seems as likely as not he’s chosen once again to give himself over to Jesus. Such would be on point with at least part of nearly every record he’s written since his gospel years.

“Black Rider” – Frontier mysticism. Western noir. The instrumentation becomes sparer as the song unfolds. A fluttering mandolin quiets down as the song progresses. A guitar strums once every four beats to note the chord change while an upright bass plunks the root. This is a song of attrition, of a way of life fading into the past. Dylan’s scratchy voice dictates to the black rider what he’s been through and what he faces: “The road that you’re on, the same road that you know / Just not the same as it was a minute ago.” But the perspective shifts in the third verse, when Dylan sings, “I’m walkin’ away, you try to make me look back.” The speaker pleads the black rider for mercy, then he threatens the black rider: “I’ll take a sword and hack off your arm.” In the end, in a deathblow of sorts, the speaker decides to “take the high moral ground.” The speaker has navigated the progress of the years more ably than the black rider who, in the end, has “been on the job too long.” The darkness is vanquished, though not before having exacted its toll.

“Goodbye Jimmy Reed” – Dylan has said that he locates his religion in music, especially gospel songs and spirituals. In this tight blues cut, Dylan cries out to the late blues musician, Jimmy Reed, to “Give me that old-time religion, it’s just what I need.” Comparisons to “Blind Willie McTell” arise as Dylan lavishes praise on this blues icon, but here Dylan and Reed are on more equal footing, contemporaries, just as they were on the ‘60s pop charts. “Thump on the bible, proclaim a creed,” Dylan requests at the end of the second verse before a tidy guitar lick leads the band back into a stomp reminiscent of 1966’s “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” In the third verse, the “I” floats in, and the listener starts to wonder whose history the speaker is detailing. “I didn’t play guitar behind my head,” Dylan sings, and then a verse later he hauls out a familiar complaint: “They threw everything at me, everything in the book.” The infamous “Judas” invective comes to mind here, as do more recent charges of “plagiarist.” But Dylan pleads, “I can’t sing a song that I don’t understand.” Neither can Reed, who speaks up in the last verse that he’s just “looking for the man / Came to see where he’s lying in this lost land.” Such are Dylan’s powers that he can skew the perspective, play with the context, and make his composition move with the cadence of the electric blues.


“Mother of Muses” – Here is a hymn addressed to Mnemosyne, goddess of memory and mother of the muses. Not a traditional invocation of the muse, since Dylan’s calling to their mother instead and doing so late in the album, Dylan still intones, “Mother of muses, sing for me.” The music wafts through lines where Dylan glorifies the gods and yearns for their intervention in the strained and reverent singing style of his 2010 holiday album, Christmas in the Heart. More specifically, Dylan’s speaker asks the mother to “sing of the heroes who stood alone” and goes on to enumerate generals from the Civil War and World War II, all of whom “cleared the path for Presley to sing / Who carved the path for Martin Luther King.” One muse does appear: Calliope, “speakin’ with her eyes” to the enamored narrator. But then, as if exhausted by the effort involved in all this creation, the speaker admits, “I’ve already outlived my life by far.” In the final verse, he asks the mother to “Make me invisible like the wind” and concludes, “I’m slow comin’ home.” This engagement with Greek mythology harkens back to Dylan’s Nobel Prize lecture, where he counts The Odyssey among his most influential texts.

“Crossing the Rubicon” – Whereas “Mother of Muses” finds Dylan pleading for power from the gods, now he tells of when he sealed his own fate and “crossed the Rubicon.” This third of three blues numbers on Rough and Rowdy Ways finds the band slowing the tempo and waiting for Dylan’s snarl—“I can feel the bones beneath my skin and they’re trembling with rage / I’ll make your wife a widow, you’ll never see old age”—to cut and jab their way through the beat. The bent and flattened notes recall “Million Miles” from 1997’s Time Out of Mind, which, like Oh Mercy, was produced by Daniel Lanois. This 2020 release doesn’t list a producer, though Dylan has shown he doesn’t need help in that department, having produced each of his other eight albums in the new millennium under the pseudonym Jack Frost. And while the album credits his regular touring band as personnel, it also includes five others, including Benmont Tench and Fiona Apple. What instruments any of them played on any of the tracks is anyone’s guess, though Dylanologists are already hard at work sussing it out. For this song that adventures through landscapes of romantic sublimity and ruin, another Dylan quest song comes to mind: “Isis,” from 1976’s Desire. Both songs begin by stating the exact day the speaker connected with a goddess and had to journey on. When an artist like Dylan has been making records for six decades, such connections are inevitable. But for an artist like Dylan who conflates time and persona, voice and authorship almost as a rule, these intertexts compose the great framework of the Dylan catalogue.

 

“Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” – As the brushed drums, exhaling accordion, and gentle guitars feel out the opening of this song, one almost expects Dylan to breathe out Oh Mercy’s “Most of the Time.” Instead, this place-name song soon feels like Dylan’s attempt at a Jimmy Buffet tune, sans that tequila-calypso feel. “Key West is the gateway key / To innocence and purity,” Dylan sings. “Key West is the enchanted land.” Fragments of a narrative emerge, beginning with the 1901 assassination of President McKinley. The song’s speaker recalls hearing about it on a radio. Tuning the dial, looking for “that pirate radio station,” provides the song’s backbone. Meanwhile its dirge tempo and contemplations of mortality—the speaker perhaps considering taking his own life by ingesting “Tiny blossoms of a toxic plant”—is rescued only by an uplifting chorus. “Key West is fine and fair / If you lost your mind you can find it there,” Dylan promises. And since “Key West is on the horizon line,” salvation must be just over this bridge.

“Murder Most Foul” – At the end of Rough and Rowdy Ways, at nearly seventeen minutes long, stands the first of the tracks released to the world and the longest official studio recording in the Dylan catalogue. “Murder Most Foul” came out of the blue one night soon after the global pandemic had shut down the U.S. “Stay safe, stay observant, and may god be with you” Dylan communicated as part of a brief, rare message that accompanied the release. While so many artists were singing songs of uplift and hope in that time, “Murder Most Foul” stared directly into the nation’s dark soul, occupying the convertible in which JFK was assassinated. “They blew off his head while he was still in the car” Dylan sing-talks over quiet, ethereal instrumentation—arpeggiated chords on a piano, a bowed bass, a whisper of drums. Then as if stationed in a security center with cameras trained at all angles, listeners see the scene from above, below, within. The evil-doers have their say: “Shoot him while he runs, boy, shoot him while you can.” The conspiracists speak up about “Oswald and Ruby” and the “party going on behind the Grassy Knoll.” The ensuing years unravel with LBJ’s swearing in, the British Invasion, the concert-goer murdered by Hell’s Angels at the Altamonte Speedway. “His soul was not there where it was supposed to be at,” the speaker claims of JFK and zooms far ahead, “For the last fifty years they’ve been searching for that.” And the perspective returns to the car where the First Lady cradles her mortally wounded husband. An entity—is it the speaker, JFK himself?—calls out to the iconic dj Wolfman Jack, and the songs and films and cultural references ease into the airwaves as the party speeds to the hospital. “The soul of a nation has been torn away,” the speaker later proclaims, and calls on Wolfman Jack to “Play me a song.” What spills forth is an epic litany of references interrupted only by the assassination of RFK some five years later. The pain is overwhelming. The music invoked provides a balm, but also a platform for processing this turning point in American history, this “murder most foul.” 

In “Murder Most Foul,” time goes everywhere, as does the point of view. Dylan’s vocals command the space of the song which can’t be excerpted or abridged. It must be taken as a whole, as a painting or collage. In this way, “Murder Most Foul” represents the whole of the album, in which Dylan explores many versions of his narrative self alongside various modes of transcendence: music, mythology, death. The song is the album; the album is the career. But don’t call Rough and Rowdy Ways Dylan’s capstone, his farewell. If nothing else, this album proves Dylan still has a lot of time to explore.

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