Bob Dylan previews new double album with moody ‘False Prophet’ music

Bob Dylan will launch his first album of unique songs in eight years, “Tough and Rowdy Methods,” on June 19th. Early Friday morning, Dylan dropped a 3rd music from the album, the swaggering, guitar-heavy “False Prophet,” which follows “Homicide Most Foul” and “I Include Multitudes.”  “I ain’t no false prophet,” Dylan growls over a slinky striptease-blues groove, powered by a downright filthy fuzz-guitar riff. “I simply know what I do know.”


The music’s lyrics veer between existential weariness, Willie Dixon-worthy boasts, unabashed come-ons (at one level addressing two girls – “Mary Lou” and “Miss Pearl” – without delay) and extra religious allusions. He nods to a Zen koan with a line about “climbing a mountain of swords with my naked ft,” quotes Martin Luther’s phrase “enemy of strife,” tells a “poor satan” to lookup at a “metropolis of God,” and ends the music by casually singing “I can’t bear in mind once I was born/ and I forgot once I died,” adopted by a fusillade of lead guitar.


Dylan, who gained the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature, has lengthy rejected the title of prophet, false or not. “You are feeling like an impostor when somebody thinks you’re one thing and also you’re not,” he instructed “60 Minutes‘” Ed Bradley in 2004. “I by no means wished to be a prophet or savior. Elvis, possibly. I might simply see myself turning into him. However prophet? No.”


In a broadly reported passage from a 2007 memoir, former Pope Benedict wrote that he was sad with Dylan’s look at a Vatican youth occasion: “There was purpose to be skeptical – I used to be, and in some methods I nonetheless am – over whether or not it was actually proper to permit such a ‘prophet’ to look.”


Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan performs on the 17th Annual Critics’ Selection Film Awards in 2012.Christopher Polk/Getty Photos

Dylan’s final album of latest songs was 2012’s “Tempest,” which he adopted with three collections of requirements: “Shadows within the Evening,” “Fallen Angels,” and “Triplicate.”


“Tough and Rowdy Methods,” which is sort of actually named after the 1929 Jimmie Rodgers basic “My Tough and Rowdy Methods,” will likely be his 39th studio album, touchdown 57 years after his debut LP. The brand new album has ten tracks; on the CD model, the 17-minute-long “Homicide Most Foul” will get its personal disc.





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