The coronavirus crisis forced him to cancel a string of dates in Japan and North America this spring and summer, but he has promised to be back on the road as soon as it's safe to do so. 'As Dylan pushes 80, his creative vitality remains startling - and a little frightening,' wrote critic Rob Sheffield.ĭespite his years, Dylan, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2012, has toured almost non-stop for the past three decades. Rolling Stone magazine hailed it an 'absolute classic,' calling it one of Dylan's 'most timely albums ever.' In a review on its website, critic Mark Beaumont wrote 'Rough? Perhaps, but it certainly has the warmth and lustre of the intimate and home-made.' 'I ain't no false prophet / I just said what I said / I'm just here to bring vengeance on somebody's head,' he sings over a slow blues riff.īritish music magazine NME called the album 'arguably his grandest poetic statement yet.' In 'False Prophet,' the album's six-minute second track, Dylan sounds cocky and unapologetic as he addresses his own mythology. Recounting Kennedy's slaying, Dylan sings: 'We're gonna kill you with hatred, without any respect / We'll mock you and shock you and we'll put it in your face / We've already got someone here to take your place.' The 'Birdman of Alcatraz,' a convicted murderer who became a respected ornithologist raising birds in prison, gets a mention, too. The song, which rose to the top of the Billboard chart, is packed with artist name-drops including the Eagles, Charlie Parker, Stevie Nicks, Woodstock and The Beatles.ĭylan - some of whose most-loved songs from the 1960s and 70s addressed police brutality and racism, such as 'Hurricane' - also mentions the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. 1 contains six songs and two raps, all from. 'Murder Most Foul,' first revealed in March, retells the shooting of President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas while describing the evolution of 1960s counterculture. Getting into specifics, and using the producers numbering choice (which seems to be arbitrary at best), Side No. In 'I Contain Multitudes,' Dylan cites Indiana Jones, Anne Frank and the Rolling Stones in the same verse. The songs run through 20th century pop culture, touch on myths and refer to historical and fictional figures - some light, others tragic. I think about it in general terms, not in a personal way.' Every human being, no matter how strong or mighty, is frail when it comes to death. 'Not to be light on it, but everybody's life is so transient. The long strange trip of the naked ape,' he replied. 'I think about the death of the human race. Later he says: 'I sleep with life and death in the same bed.'ĭylan was asked about the lyrics in a recent interview with The New York Times, his first since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. He starts by singing tenderly, 'Today and tomorrow and yesterday too / The flowers are dying like all things do.' In the album's opening song 'I Contain Multitudes,' the 79-year-old grapples with mortality.

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