There’s no doubting that Dylan’s new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020), is the work of an aging man. He has been that a while already; he’s been singing fairly constantly about death since at least Time Out of Mind (1997). When Tempest (2012) was released, many took the reference to Shakespeare’s last play to mean that it was his last album. (Adept at keeping open possibilities—whether it’s the post-“motorcyle crash” release of John Wesley Harding (1967), his evangelicalism, or the Christmas Songs, surprise and strangeness are his favorite tools in the grand project of refusing to be known—Dylan insisted the absence of the definite article disrupted the analogy). Now the surprise seems to be that he is still alive, and something—the Nobel Prize? Covid-19?—has put him in a good mood. It’s contagious.
Rough and Rowdy Ways is not an album about love or relationships or women or even characters. There’s a scattering of women: the “women of the chorus”; the creations of other songwriters (Ricky Nelson’s Mary Lou, Jimmy Wages’ Miss Pearl); and, pleasingly, to millennial women like me, Stevie Nicks gets a mention. There’s one gentle rolling love song, “I’ve Made up My Mind to Give Myself to You.” It’s an easy refrain: “A love so real, a love so true / I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.” Dylan perfected the crooner style with his Frank Sinatra studies in Triplicate (2017), his covers of the American Songbook. He’s turned the standards into his own songs you swear you’ve heard before. In one respect, this is a love song that fits into a pattern, from “Oh Sister” (1976) onwards, in which the other is both God and lover. But it also marks a change. Compare Romantic Bob for whom love was mania, restlessness, and hearing voices, or, later, the thing to be repressed and outrun (as in “Most of the Time” (1989): “I can survive / and I can endure / and I don’t even think / about her”). Or compare the more recent bitterness of “Long and Wasted Years” (2012): “It’s been such a long, long time/ since we loved each other and our hearts were true.” Relatively speaking, Dylan is all ease and contentment: “I’ve seen the sunrise, I’ve seen the dawn / I’ll lay down beside you when everyone’s gone.” What’s new is how settled it all feels.
But it’s relentless, nonetheless. I suppose it’s in keeping with Dylan’s two-decade preoccupation with death, but it sounds to me more like he finds himself in a kind of grateful American purgatory—still outrunning death, but also letting life wash over him. It’s a touching album; it feels good to listen to it. This was not obvious from the first single “Murder Most Foul,” a 17-minute ballad about the assassination of John F. Kennedy released online in March at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown. With its heads-up to the “12 million souls that are listening in,” it’s already repetitive to say its relentlessness confirms Dylan’s knack for timing and celebrity. “Murder Most Foul” is a romp through Kennedy’s life and the United States of the postwar. What it shares with the rest of the album is a nostalgia for those sounds, and those of an earlier America; with its ballads, blues, and show tunes, it never looks forward, only back.