Bob Dylan has a lot to say these days.
On "Rough and Rowdy Ways," his first album of original material in eight years, the enduringly revered bard sings about mortality, history, pop culture, love and inspiration — and a whole lot more. A lot more.
Like almost every Dylan album of self-penned tunes, "Rough and Rowdy Ways" demands numerous listenings to reveal itself. His longest 10-song collection ever is packed with rhyming couplets, references to literary and historical figures, and shout-outs to various musicians and songs.
His 39th studio album is filled with melancholy meditations and swaggering blues, self-styled mysteries and graceful elegies, and oblique self-references and quotable lines. At 79, Dylan remains as trenchantly sharp and delightfully confounding as ever.
The Minnesota-born singer-songwriter has always been a master of his own time. Without any advance notice, he dropped three selections from "Rough and Rowdy Ways" at midnight on three different Fridays this spring. Those tunes bookend the new 70½-minute double album.
Backed by gently plucked guitar, Dylan opens with "I Contain Multitudes," letting us know that he's a complex soul, "a man of contradictions, a man of many moods." Apparently content with his life, he has "no apologies to make."
And he fires off one of those Dylanesque lines that will be analyzed and quoted for years to come: "I sleep with life and death in the same bed."
Next up is the last of his three pre-album singles, "False Prophet," a sluggish shuffle delivered with a gnarling voice and a sideways eye. Is Dylan disowning all the acclaim heaped on him or trying to own it?