throw my suitcase out there too

     The UK online paper The Guardian invited readers to write reviews of Bob Dylan's new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways.


Tom Harding of Northampton wrote,


As a self-confessed Dylanologist, I am very happy with this record.  

For those paying attention, Dylan has been busy for some time creating, or perhaps curating, a new language of expression.  The incessant inter-textualisation of pop culture allusions and literature, the love and often blatant theft of pre-war blues, Japanese pulp novels, civil war poets, New Orleans travel guides, and frankly anything not tied down.  

A means to solve a dilemma of how you still write great songs when admittedly you can't quite do it as freewheelingly as you used to....


Brandon Brotherton in Denton, Texas, said:

     This is as comfortable as he's ever sounded.  Even the blues stomps are loose and easygoing.  It's his goal of having the past, present and future all in the same place, fully realised.   He's done with being lovesick, resigned to building his own version.  Even the love songs (such as I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You) seem to be more about life on the road than a commitment to a newly found relationship.  


The singing is as good as it's been since Time Out of Mind.  I wasn't all that interested in his recent run of covers records, but it obviously inspired a softness in his vocal approach and, with the music, it gives off a feeling of continuous drift.  In the end, he's content sitting on the beach, watching it all burn.



Niall Brennan, York
     Simple words and simple language again suggesting something far larger, far more multitudinous.  This album is a quiet, humble masterpiece from an artist at the peak of his powers.


"dylan37"

There's dark graveyard humour, aching love songs to old flames that still flicker, a long scene by scene musical version of Oliver Stone's best film mixed in with a flick through Bob's vinyl collection.  It feels like going for a ride in an old Cadillac through an America of Hemingway and Hopper, all the way to Key West, with Howlin' Wolf and Jimmy Reed on the transistor radio.





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Alexis Petridis reviewed the album for The Guardian, writing, "This isn't perhaps the most comforting communique to issue in the middle of a global pandemic, but then the man behind it has seldom dealt in soothing reassurance.  

And besides, it doesn't matter.  

For all its bleakness, Rough and Rowdy Ways might well be Bob Dylan's most consistently brilliant set of songs in years...you don't need a PhD in Dylanology to appreciate its singular quality and power."

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