Bob Dylan has done it again. He's dropped another single around midnight Eastern for the third time this spring. But he also delivered a bigger surprise: a new album, "Rough and Rowdy Ways," arriving on June 19 -- his first collection of original material since 2012's "The Tempest."
The 10-song album will be available in two-CD and two-vinyl format as well as digitally.
Meanwhile, late Thursday night Dylan offered another single, "False Prophet," an ambling blues that sounds like it fits with his other recent late-night singles, the epic 17-minute "Murder Most Foul" (Dylan's longest song ever) and the 4½ minute "I Contain Multitudes." ("Murder Most Foul" will appear on its own CD on the new album.)
"False Prophet" clocks in a just under six minutes. The Minnesota bard doesn't fill this tune with couplets of pop culture and political references as he did on those previous singles.
"I ain't no false prophet," he growls. "I just know what I know."
Leave it to Dylanologists to parse if this false prophet is any relation to the sad-eyed prophet in his long-winded "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" in 1966.
"I ain't no false prophet/ Nah, I'm nobody's bride," Dylan sings on the final verse of his new song. "Can't remember when I was born/ And I forgot when I died." Then some dirty blues guitar takes over.
"Rough and Rowdy Ways" will be Dylan's seventh studio album in the last 23 years. His most recent efforts were collections of standards, "Shadows in the Night" (2015), "Fallen Angels" (2016) and "Triplicate" (2017).
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