Left wing? right wing? chicken wing!

     What follows is my critical analysis of a recent article, titled: “The Truth About Bob Dylan’s Falling Out With Pete Seeger”, written by Michael Moynihan, and published in The Free Press on January 5^th 2025 Link. The article is a commentary on the narrative that was presented in the recent James Mangold directed Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown”. The premise of the article is that Bob’s rejection of the folk music establishment, in favour of amplified Rock music, was due to an ideological shift away from the politics of the left in favour of a more conservative outlook. The author’s claim is that Bob’s “going electric” at the Newport folk festival, alleged squabble with Pete Seeger, and his apparent betrayal of the lefty folky folks and their movement, which Bob found himself to be the spearhead of in the mid 60’s, was REALLY his symbolic rejection of communism/Stalinism and therefore embracing of McCarthyism and the “Red Scare” (my words not his). This claim would require that Bob stopped believing in social justice, civil rights and left wing political causes in general, sometime between the release of “The Times They Are A Changin” (1964) and “Bringing it All Back Home” (1965).

In my humble opinion, Moynihan’s article suffers from bias and spin that are not surprising considering the author, the media company and its intended audience, all of whom veer towards right wing conservatism. Moynihan claims that the narrative portrayed in “A Complete Unknown” deliberately obfuscates Bob’s ideological shift to the right, as one might expect from a Hollywood leftist propaganda piece, but based on the generally accepted narrative it seems to be Moynihan that is the historical revisionist. Did Bob really reject those woke lefty folks and their politics? If so, what might we reasonably gleam as his reasons for doing so? Is it possibile that Dylan was simply inspired by a new artistic vision and was rejecting the huge amount of pressure associated with being anointed the spokesperson of a generation? To get to the bottom of this we have to look at Bob’s natural history.

Bob was raised in a mostly secular/Jewish home in the cultural backwaters of 1940s Minnesota. All indications are that he grew up, just like many young American boys of that era, wanting to ride a motorbike, impress his friends and get the girl. Wanting to be James Dean. This desire for success in any and all of its perceived forms, encompassed by the American dream, is a great motivator for kids and adults alike. In rare cases, a combustible desire combined with inherent talent and a Goldilocks context of nurturing circumstances can manifest in an artist with unparalleled creative genius, such as Bob. As we know, Bob was spurred on and inspired after his discovery of the American folk hero, iconoclast and rebellious wandering troubadour, Woody Guthrie. The James Dean of folk music. Guthrie, whose mythology and songs have come to represent the experience, the struggle, and the very spirit of America, was a lifelong socialist, political radical and social activist. Dylan absorbed Guthrie; his music, his identity, his social conscience and his humanist impulses. Shortly after becoming Guthrie, Dylan proceeded to compose some of the most powerful and iconic socially conscious political songs ever, including “Blowin’ in The Wind”. All evidence indicates that he was steeped in anti-war, pro-civil rights and other leftist causes, partly through the influence of his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo. Did he not stand on the stage behind Martin Luther King Jr. at the march on Washington in 1963 during the “I have a dream” speech, and travel across the country with Pete Seeger in support of civil rights? Certainly he did. Did he also write a-political love songs and ballads? absolutely. Bob, who is known for messing with his interviewers, once said that he never intended “Blowin’ in the Wind” as a protest song. Moynihan seizes upon this one quote as evidence that Bob was trying to distance himself from the protest movement by 1965, which, while possible, tells us nothing about his political affiliations. Although he largely disappeared from the scene, he remained a big inspiration for the social justice and anti-war movement that lasted right up to the late 60s; while others, such as Neil Young stepped up to fill the void.

Moynihan’s argument can be distilled thus: Bob rejected leftism. Bob is great. Leftist causes and social activism suck! Score one point for conservatives. Only the second proposition is patently true. Even IF Moynihan has some express access to the contents of Bob’s mind in 1964, things that have never been revealed in interviews or in print, so what? Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say he is right, Bob woke up one day and said “I don’t believe in all this leftist, communist bullshit”, as the author of the article seems to believe. We still have to ask, “so what”? If Bob jumped off a bridge would that be proof that it’s a good thing to do? If Bob accepts Jesus into his heart (which of course he did), should we all do the same? Should it impact our enjoyment of his music? Perhaps the world would be a better place if Bob had stuck with his activism and protest songs in the late 60’s.

The period of Bob’s career encompassed in the climactic sequences of “A Complete Unknown” was for sure an inflection point. But evidence that a political ideological change was behind it is lacking. By rejecting Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and essentially all his fans, while going electric, he was not necessarily rejecting the social justice movement, or the value system of the left. The most obvious explanation is rather that Bob was making a profound and personal protest. That is to say, rather than stepping away from protest, he was twisting the screw to transform the nature of his protest. He was now protesting the box. He was asserting that he was both less and much more than what his followers were making him out to be. His new songs were protest songs of a whole new sort, which demonstrated an artistry on a whole different level, to the extent that what was being protested was not always clear. It wasn’t protest songs that were being abandoned, but topical songs. His new material was more existential, the lyrics were surreal and toyed with meaning. Clear literal narratives were replaced with riddles. If there was anything Bob was rejecting it was the possibility that words could convey clear and specific meaning, that anything in this world could be cut and dry.

Apart from this simple explanation, Moynihan seems to miss or gloss over the fact that Bob was formatively influenced by the Blues, Country, Rockabilly and R&B, in addition to folk music, with evidence of this going back to his very first studio sessions (“Mixed Up Confusion”). Considering this, and Bob’s revolutionary nature, his alchemical shift in musical styles, which lead to the creation of a whole new genre, folk-rock, is not quite so surprising. Moynihan’s knowledge lapses make me wonder, does he know enough about Bob to be able to make just pronouncements about what motivated his change of tack? I get the sense that Moynihan is a bit green on the topic, and may not have any real insight into what makes Bob tick. Although I don’t doubt that he’s a big fan, he may not be “Aspergerian” enough. Critically, he doesn’t bring the receipts to back up his argument. His villainization of Pete Seeger, and by association all members of the folk revival, based on his undying support for Stalin, also seems to go too far. According to his Wikipedia page Seeger’s support for Soviet-style Socialism began to wane with increasing evidence of atrocities associated with the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Should Seeger have publicly renounced support for Stalin sooner? Probably. But his faith in communism can be separated from this lapse in judgement, and his belief in a fairer and better world is certainly his defining characteristic.  In 1995 he said: "I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it". Will we ever tire of flogging the communist straw-man?

In formulating his understanding of Bob Dylan, Moynihan seems to be erroneously projecting some of the characteristics of the lead character in the 1992 political satire “Bob Roberts” Trailer. The movie is about a right-wing conservative folk singing senator running for President. This character is figuratively and literally a mirror inverse of Bob Dylan. He sings “The Times They Are Changing, Back”, and “This Land is My Land”. The movie demonstrates the extreme (although not by modern standards) of what could happen with the assent to the presidency of the United States by a vapid and corrupt showman that is utterly devoid of any social or moral standard. The character just happens to be conservative, and not one of those woke lefties. And that’s pretty much how it ended up happening in real life, 24 years after the movie was released.

Did Bob reject leftism and social justice in the mid 60s? highly debateable. Did Bob become more conservative later in life? Likely. It is in fact a common trajectory that I will discuss below. Winston Churchill was falsely attributed as saying “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain”. While I disagree with the qualification of the phenomenon, there is truth to the trajectory as a general trend, and there are also exceptions. The British historian Paul Addison pointed out that Churchill himself had been a conservative at 15, and a Liberal at 35. However, in the flush of youth we generally start off filled with hope and naivety that the world can change, with total imaginative and creative plasticity. As we age, we become more set in our ways, more jaded. We ossify. The hard knocks of life and the biological/neurological damage that accrues naturally with age (and faster with the rockstar lifestyle of drug and alcohol abuse), makes us less dynamic. We become less able to dream in the metaphorical sense, and our literal ability to dream diminishes relative to the young. Our old curmudgeonly selves become more “conservative”. We decide that certain things that we precociously believed were possible are not possible. We clutch for the pearls in moral panic and fear. We become less tolerant of immigrants (instead of pitying them), homeless people (including hobo’s), and marginalized groups in society as our faculties wane, and we lose sight of the very thin line between good and evil. Young people have the advantage of a kind of beginners mind: free of all the meta-garbage, false-assumptions and propaganda that gets deposited in our brains through the banality of culture; Free of all the brain worms, and the thoughts not-our-own that have been implanted by parents, teachers and society at large, and left to suppurate. As Dylan sings counter-intuitively “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”. To be wise, we must get younger. To stay free, to continue to care we must stay forever young.

I’ll end this with a finer point on Moynihan’s folly. Early on in his piece he sets a trap that he proceeds to fall into himself. After noting that “with minimal quote-mining, one can create endless iterations of Dylan: left-wing or right-wing, evangelical Christian or messianic Jew, civil rights activist or subterranean racist”, he then proceeds to use quote-mining (badly) to create a version of Bob that suits his personal viewpoint or ideals (likely those of a subterranean racist, lol). It’s true that Bob wears many hats, and he has many faces, many personas, and many voices. He also likes to wear masks, some of which are indistinguishable from his actual face. He wants to be, as the movie title suggests, a complete unknown. All of this creates a kind of mystique that is part of his enduring allure. He is of course an artist and a performer, all of whom are engaged in building a public facing persona. He is an iconoclast, but he takes it even further; he plays with his public image and messes with people’s expectations, and what they “want him to be”, as if to say “I am all of these things, and more, but also none of this”. Therefore, Bob can be what you want him to be. If you want him to be a lefty, listen to his protest songs. If you want him to be God-fearing, listen to his gospel (which ironically is some of his best protest music), if you want him to be anti-Science listen to the last line in “Do Right To Me Baby”.

Just like any Bob fan, I find in him what I want to find. When I was an idealistic teenager I gravitated towards his early political content. “Where have you been my blue eyed son”, spoke directly to me. It painted a picture of an unjust and chaotic world, where human suffering was a consequence of natural disasters and man-made disasters (“I saw a white man that walked a black dog”). “God on our side” was pretty clear to me in its atheistic thrust. A clear condemnation of the twisted logic that allowed us to forgive ourselves for slaughtering the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and then to forgive the Germans for slaughtering the Jews. To my mind, the message was clear: how can there be a God at all if he is on the side of all of these evil actions throughout history? In what universe can a good and just God allow and condone genocide? Others have interpreted this song differently, and different spins are possible. This is a prime example of how the listener can develop a relationship to a song, which acts as a kind of touch stone or scaffold for a developing philosophical concept. That’s really what Bob’s music did for me. It helped me to learn, and to develop my personal philosophy about the world and place it in a historical context. In my particular case, coming from a left leaning upbringing, Bob’s songs served as a catalyst to help me grow my particular flavour of philosophy or ideology. This continues regardless of whatever his own political view points are currently. Bob fans that had a conservative upbringing, no doubt accentuated and amplified those messages that supported, based on their own set of biases and assumptions, a very different philosophical outlook. They probably spent more time listening to John Wesley Harding. Our minds look for points of congruence, that support our pre-existing psychological momentum. Although there may be moments where a song challenges us and our assumptions, it is unlikely that our goal in listening to music is to produce feelings of cognitive dissonance.

Bob is a mysterious human. Trying to understand him using his art is a difficult, but worthy exercise. His art is really a reflection of his inner world of dreams, nightmares and other subconscious stuff, and therefore represents a tussle with his inner demons and symbolic fragments of his personality; and since most of us struggle with universal ills and demons, Bob’s art is like a Rosetta stone for our own intellectual and philosophical journeys. We may never know the real Bob, and just like any of us his political views and rational perspectives on culture and politics must be shifting and evolving over time, and in response to changes in the world itself. Certainly he did return to protest songs in a more complex form in the 70’s (Hurricane, George Jackson) and 80’s (Infidels, the Gospel albums). Also, Bob was very friendly with Barak Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, and not at all with any republican president (that I know of), which might be a subtle hint of his political leanings. On the 2018 album “Universal Love”, Bob contributes the first song, “He’s Funny That Way”. The album features various artists singing gender-specific love songs with pronouns adjusted to refer to same gender. He’s hardly an LGBTQ activist, however his endorsement of this project suggests that he is sympathetic to the cause. Ultimately, he cannot be categorized, and any effort to do so must be taken with a grain of salt. It’s like trying to ascertain the political ideology of Mount Everest. He transcends identity politics and always has. As his mentor Woody Guthrie said, “Left wing? Right wing? Chicken wing.”

Owed To Bob

Dear fellow fans of Bob,

My tribute to the man (linked bellow), ‘Owed To Bob’, was recorded entirely on my iPhone and mixed in Logic. What's more, all the songs were recorded in that place where singing always sounds best, the shower. While I am currently working on a bunch of new original and cover songs in the studio, including some more Bob, there is something about being at home and completely at ease that can bring out a certain type of performance that is genuine and unforced. Although high end mics and studio approaches are great, ultimately the performance, capturing a feel and a moment in time, is essential. 

Thanks for listening! 

Noah

https://noahfine.bandcamp.com/album/owed-to-bob

Bob Birthday Tribute in Toronto

Just over a week ago I played a little Bob birthday tribute gig with my friend Mike Ford at the Sidekick cafe in Toronto, Canada.

Please check out a few excerpts below and follow my Instagram for more music to come!

Cheers!

Noah

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cs7cjuKN2FI/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

In anticipation of Bootlegs Volume 17

"Time Out of Mind" was a life altering event for me. The day after my 19^th birthday (April 28, 1996) I saw my first Dylan concert at a relatively small venue in Toronto, The Masonic Temple, where he played tribute to the recently deceased Jerry Garcia. I was just getting into folky and acoustic based music, and was deep into the first three Dylan albums. The first time I heard "Lovesick", blasting on the stereo in the back seat of my brother's car, it blew my mind. I quickly recognised the entire album as a masterpiece. Every song on the album was excellent, with the possible exception of "Make You Feel My Love", which was perhaps a bit too saccharin and also had the dubious distinction of having already been a hit for supremely uncool New Country star Garth Brooks. Dylan's cool factor, on the other hand, went through the roof for me. He was eminently and majestically relevant again. His lyrics, darker than ever and highly potent, resonated with my own experiences of rejection and frustration in relationships. Seeing Dylan touring for "Time Out Of Mind", at the top of his game, was one of the peak concert experiences of my lifetime. His delivery was so dry and understated, his voice better than ever, never phrasing the way it is on the album, and therefore providing an authentic and unique experience. All of this steeped in the context of the rich swampy and earthy sound of his band. Peak Bob. Seeing him still playing guitar on every track, and watching his hands closely to be sure that it was in fact him playing those sick licks and fills, and not one of his bandmates. I saw him several times in Toronto over the period from 1998 to 2001. In my memory he played the songs off "Time Out Of Mind", but when I looked back at the setlists he didn’t play all that many, during the Toronto shows at least. By 2001 he played many songs off “Love and Theft” and nothing off “Time Out of Mind” at his Toronto show. But what he did do was to make all of his other songs sound as wicked and awesome as his new songs. It was a game to try and figure out what song he was playing from the intro, and sometimes it would take a few verses to figure it out, or you’d find out later it was some obscure cover. Here is one highlight from this era:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRy1UOjcz8E

While previously, listening to Dylan’s early output felt like looking at the light from a supernova, that had been traveling through time and space, with the event itself having occurred in the remote past. With this new turning point in Dylan history I was actually living through it in real time, seeing it live and being on the scene. It felt momentous when Dylan and Lanois won the Grammy for best album (well deserved) that year, and seeing the infamous “Soybomb” protest live on TV.

 

The release of Bootlegs volume 17 is well timed to coincide with the 25^th anniversary of the original release. What follows is a quick rundown of what we can expect based on the tracklist. Disc 5 is just a compilation of the outtake material that was previously released on “Tell Tale Signs”. Disc 2 and 3 are weird because they appear to contain some songs that are also on disc 5, such as two takes of “Can’t wait”, two takes of “Mississippi”, two takes of “Red River Shore”, “Marchin’ to the City” and “Dreamin’ of you”. Why include all these songs twice, especially considering we’ve heard these versions before?

 New alternate takes (and only one outtake L) include “The Water is Wide”, two alternate takes of “Love Sick”, two alternate takes of “Till I fell In Love With You”, two alternate takes of “Not Dark Yet”, two alternate takes of “Dirt Road Blues”, two alternate takes of “Standing in The Doorway”, two alternate takes of “Trying to Get To Heaven”, one alternate take of “Make You Feel My Love”, one alternate take of “Cold Irons Bound” and one alternate take of “Highlands”. This means there are alternate takes of every song on the album except for “Million Miles”. I’m guessing they nailed that one on the first take.

             While the alternate takes are interesting, because they can tell you something about process and the birth of these songs, I’m more excited for disc 1 and 4. Disc 4 includes live versions of every song on the album, plus “Mississippi”. All of these versions were recorded at various international venues between 1998 and 2001. Dylan does not release enough of his live material, and is sitting on a mother load of recordings that could easily provide material for another 17 Bootleg box sets. This disc is a good start.

             Disc one is by far the most exciting. Instead of putting out a boring remaster, the album has been re-mixed and stripped down to be more similar to what the original recording sounded like before Daniel Lanois added all his swampy effects. The difference between remix and remaster is everything. While mastering is important and can make a big difference to the overall sound, in my experience it is often difficult to hear the difference of a “remastered” album compared to the original, especially if it was mastered well the first time. Maybe these kind of subtle differences can be noticeable on a really high end stereo. A new mix of an album is a different story. Although the recorded tracks are all the same, all the ways that each individual track gets processed digitally including compression, reverb, delay, panning and levels are now in play and therefore should lead to a unique re-interpretation of the album. 

I will leave you with this video explaining that time in some sense does not actually exist, although it is unlikely that you can get it out of your mind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdL8CudJTcs

Rough and Rowdy Ways review

     Rough and Rowdy Ways is bold and satisfying. Better, by my estimation than the last three albums of original material, Tempest, Together Through Life and Modern Times. Although these were all great albums, they didn’t push the limits and defy expectations the way Time Out of Mind and “Love and Theft” did. Rough and Rowdy Ways does push the limits in that way. It carves new territory lyrically and stylistically, and redeploys the bag of tricks that Bob has been working with since his re-invention at the end of the last millennium in interesting ways. One of the ways that this album defies expectations is by existing. I wasn’t sure if he had it in him, and I am pleasantly surprised. The album opener, I Contain Multitudes, perfectly sets the scene for an album that contains just that. As the song says, “Everything’s flowing all at the same time”, tying in many of the themes that Bob has been developing in his output of the last two decades: religion, violence, mortality, the bright and dark spots of American history. Just like in the song My Own Version of You, he is mixing in his cauldron all of these distinct strains that he has been developing and crafting over the years to produce a unique brew. Sonically this is also the case, with various songs sounding like they could fit in on each of his last 5 albums of original songs. Crossing the Rubicon – Time Out of Mind; I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You - Modern Times; False Prophets – Together Through Life; Goodbye Jimmy Reed – Tempest; I contain Multitudes – Shadows in The Night. In this sense, the album is like a bookend, a swan song that summarises and ties together material from this whole era, but hopefully it can also be the first in a new trilogy.

 

Religious themes dominate more so than on any album since his Christian phase (and his Christmas album of course), in particular on the song Goodbye Jimmy Reed, which opens with a setting on a street named after a saint “where the Jews and the Catholics and the Muslims all pray”. Although the protagonist seems to have a bone to pick with Protestants for some reason. Many of the characters in his songs come across as god fearing men, such as the lead in My Own Version of You who talks about “the immortal spirit” that “creeps in your body the day you are born”. If these characters are meant to be anti-heroes, which often seems the case as they threaten to make your wife a widow, stick a knife between your ribs or hack off your arm with a sword, this could be seen as an attack on shallow proclamations of religiosity, or an attack on religion itself, which fails to alter the true nature of man. In the song, our protagonist makes an attack on Karl Marx and Sigmond Freud, who are “some of the best known enemies of mankind” and are being subjected to the “rawhide lash to rip the skin from their backs”. It is unclear whether the one strike of lighting and the blast of electricity that he requires to bring his Frankenstein to life can be seen through a Judeo-Christian lens, but something tells me this character has a dark side to him that he has chimerized with some pseudo-spiritual symbolism out of his desperate and doomed efforts to achieve immortality. The fact that his characters are multi-faceted and subject to boundless interpretation causes them to pulse with life like a painting by a great cubist master. They draw you in, but they also secrete enough venom to keep you at a distance.

 

I have discussed my feelings about Dylan’s religiosity in previous posts. Although he has always included biblical themes and mythology in his songs, this alone does not attest to the nature of his religious faith, and while many seem to conclude based on various shreds of lyrics that he is still religious at root, I believe it is an open question whether he has recovered from his Christian period or if he, on some level, is still a ‘believer’. I like the fact that this is an open question, because it creates tension that can potentially come to resolution, although unlikely as the man prefers to keep an air of mystery, which can only further bolster his legendary status and his legacy. Of course his songs are generally sung from the perspective of varied protagonists, and although some autobiographical elements are present, it is impossible to separate them out from the fictional characters, who are liable to have varied takes on the natural and the supernatural world. It is also plausible that all the various shards represent some aspect of the character of the artist. Regardless, the opacity is intentional, as it spurs continued speculation, conversation, analysis and interest.

 

The songs on this album are long and develop slowly, giving them breadth and depth. They are simultaneously open ended, offering kaleidoscopic angles of interpretation, while also being blunt and definitive. Whatever a given song maintains, it also maintains its opposite. Wisdom and wickedness; Grandiosity and the mundane; Beauty and death; Love and resentment; The mysterious and the obvious; The sacred and the real. Multitudes indeed. Just like My Own Version of You, which is literally a song about Frankenstein, the songs are themselves Frankenstein’s, where contradictory or diametric opposites are stitched together and the resulting fusions are left to their own fate, for better or worse. In Key West he practically acknowledges this: “I play both sides against the middle”. As mentioned above, this contributes to the power, tension and mystery of these songs, and their ability to spur endless analysis. By tying conflicting threads together in the same song he effectively confounds interpretation from all angles and simulates some of the mental conflicts and cognitive dissonance that many of us are, or should be dealing with in this modern and troubling time. 

 

Similarly to how he assembles the body parts of a lost love, Dylan has concocted a Frankenstein of his previous styles, voices, production techniques and lyrical turns. Most clearly, he is putting into action some of the things he learned during the recording of the Sinatra trilogy. A holistic technique of microphone placement was used on these albums to capture a very intimate live feel, and this feel is evident on many of the songs on this album. Also, his voice sounds really delicate and near, just like it did on those cover albums. This comes through best on the track I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You. At times his vocal comes through like a whispered yell, his vocal chords right on the edge and close to snapping, with just a little bit of gravel for effect. This approach helps to propel the yearning and tenderness invoked by the lyrics and the musical accompaniment. On Rubicon and Jimmy Reed his vocal sounds like vintage Bob from the Time out of Mind period, which is my favourite period for his voice. It sounds like they used a similar swampy reverb effect that was used to great effect on songs like Love Sick and Dirt Road Blues. In My Own Version of You and Rubicon he uses a vocal delivery technique that he often employs live, which at first seemed hokey, but now I must admit is endearing to me, especially when employed tastefully (and not overdone). It’s a weird effect where he spits out the lyrics in a pulsing and heaving manner, an approach that perhaps borrows from the harmonica.

 

Lyrically Rough and Rowdy Ways is complex, which means these songs will open up like a nice bottle of red wine or whisky. The experience of decoding and dissecting Dylan’s masterful lyrics is a process that requires multiple listens, with each one you are drawn deeper into the songs and the characters. This was the process that I enjoyed so much on what I consider to be his best album, “Love and Theft”. Some of the lyrical turns in the song Crossing the Rubicon grab you and viscerally pull you across the rubicon; “I turned the key and broke it off.. and crossed the rubicon”. The first time I listened to the song I thought I heard the key breaking off. The album contains some truly provocative and unexpected lyrics, not the least of which is this line from the final verse of the song Black Rider: “Black rider, black rider, hold it right there, the size of your cock will get you nowhere”. To me it sounds like he says “cockle”, as in cockles and muscles (?). Or maybe he is meaning to refer to the protagonist having been cuckolded, which also happens in the song. But this is clarified by the official lyrics. So far, exactly what those lines imply in the context of the song eludes me. Following after the darkness/starkness of Rubicon, Key West feels like you’ve reached an oasis after traversing a barren wasteland. After a while Key West feels like a desert itself, as Dylan reminds us that retiring to a beautiful paradise is itself a kind of curse. Although I appreciated the importance of the album closer, Murder Most Foul, right away, it took a while for the song to really get under my skin, and now it brings me nearly to tears.

At this stage in his career, to produce an album that sounds this beautiful, and is fresh and unique and just as challenging as any of his previous output, is a great accomplishment. Having reached such an advanced level in his song writing and recording craft, having perfected his recipe such, it will be painful for the myriad of fans to eventually lose the thread, as is inevitable. However, Bob has always been full of surprises and I trust that he has left us more gems that will be unearthed and exposed even posthumously. Maybe one day we’ll be watching a hologram of Bob on stage in Vegas, or at the Dylan archives in Tulsa.