“I’ll take a sword and hack off your arm.” For all he has seen and sung, on “Rough and Rowdy Ways” Dylan refuses to settle down, or to be anything like an elder statesman. In And in “Black Rider,” a string-band ballad that tiptoes along, pausing each time Dylan takes a breath, he addresses a mysterious figure — Death, perhaps — with alternating sympathy and aggression. It was played by Garth Hudson.n recent weeks, musicians have come up with an impressive variety of ways to keep their fans amused during lockdown. The band — Dylan’s long-evolving touring band — patiently circles through slow, stealthy vamps or, in more upbeat moments, lopes through 12-bar blues shuffles. Full of bleak and brooding rhythm and blues, Rough and Rowdy Ways reveals Dylan at his lyrical bestPerhaps more importantly, they were the kind of Dylan songs that brooked very little argument about their quality, the kind of Dylan song you could play to a Dylan agnostic as testament to his continued greatness. The great Bob Dylan made a sensational return to form with the release of his 39th studio album Rough and Rowdy Ways.. But no artist has risen to the task of keeping their audience occupied quite like He’s sardonically morbid in “My Own Version of You,” a skulking waltz with a Frankenstein-like narrator who’s scouring “morgues and monasteries” for body parts to bring someone to life. Label: Columbia - 19439780982,Sony Music - 19439780982 • Format: 2x, CD Album, Stereo • Country: Europe • Genre: Rock, Blues, Folk, World, & Country • Style: Folk, Ballad, Folk Rock A beautiful, comprehensive volume of Dylan’s lyrics, from the beginning of his career through the present day-with the songwriter’s edits to dozens of songs, appearing here for the first time. after reading such horrible reviews of the gold pressing I’m glad I received this one. He sees death looming, but he’s still in the fray.The new songs on Bob Dylan’s “Rough and Rowdy Ways” are loaded with allusions.“Rough and Rowdy Ways” follows albums of pop standards. His first album of original songs since 2012 is a death-haunted, cantankerous collection with a late-night sense of seclusion.Latter-day Bob Dylan is for die-hards. Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul – video These are musical areas in which Dylan has worked for years. Bob Dylan's first album of new material in eight years makes up for lost rhyme with songs that are funny, fascinating, elusive and epic. Greatness is often contested territory. In “Mother of Muses,” a hymnlike tune glimmering with mandolin that ponders redemption and creativity — he wants to marry Calliope, the muse of epic poetry — Dylan also praises generals from the Civil War and World War II for preserving freedom.In the 17-minute “Murder Most Foul” — set apart from the rest of the physical album release on a separate disc — Dylan presents the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy as a crucial American trauma, the moment when “the soul of a nation been torn away/and it’s beginning to go into a slow decay.” The band plays glacial, sustained, unmetered drones anchored by Tony Garnier’s bowed bass, and Dylan intones an account of the murder interspersed with song and movie titles, never spelling out whether all the culture he mentions is a consolation or a decadent distraction.There’s a creaky tenderness in “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” which has a gently undulating melody that suggests Offenbach’s Barcarolle from “Tales of Hoffmann,” as the singer seeks love as a last chance for solace: “I’ve traveled a long road of despair/I’ve met no other traveler there,” he sings. Rough and Rowdy Ways has little, if any, rock 'n' roll, but the sneer remains.