The profusion of historical and popular culture references found on ‘Murder Most Foul’ becomes a sort of theme across the record. The lyrics are by turns introspective and entirely fantastical. This gives songs like ‘I Contain Multitudes’ and ‘Key West (Philosopher Pirate)’ a moving emotionality that stretches well beyond the lyrics. His voice will always scare away would-be fans, but the 79-year-old has attained a wizened strength from the Sinatra sabbatical. Rough and Rowdy Ways is a varied collection of Americana ballads, 12-bar blues rockers and Tin Pan Alley pop music, all bent to fit Dylan’s singular style. And while nothing else here conjures the same sense of quasi-delirium, the nine songs on disc one rise to the standard set by the album’s closing epic. It’s a double album, with ‘Murder Most Foul’ the lone track on disc two. This indicated things might be different on Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan’s 39th studio album. More crucially, it moves you in a manner akin to Dylan’s best material but does so without leaning on self-referential nostalgia. It has a dream-like quality, brought about by its abstract, jazz-adjacent musical composition and the narrator’s unsteady perspective and repeated blurring of memory and historical fact. In fact, it’s unlike anything else in the songwriter’s six-decade back catalogue. Even ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ – commonly deemed the greatest song of the 1960s – is in no rush, clocking in at six minutes.īut ‘Murder Most Foul’ is nothing like either of those songs. Arguably his biggest hit, ‘Hurricane’, goes for eight and a half minutes across 11 verses. So, when Dylan returned with the 17-minute ‘Murder Most Foul’ this March, there was a twinge of “here we go again.” To be clear, no one in the history of popular music has excelled at long songs quite like Bob Dylan. But the 50+ Sinatra covers failed to reveal how Dylan had earnt such an absolutist following in the first place. The records weren’t bad – his grizzled old man voice had gained a nice gooey sub-timbre, and the arrangements were nothing if not tasteful. And what of the three ensuing LPs, the third of which, Triplicate, was a 30-track triple album? Well, much like 2009’s Christmas in the Heart, it was hard to tell whether Bob wasn’t just trolling his pious following.
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