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In October 2014, Bob Dylan was wrapping up a three-night stand at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California, home of the Oscar broadcast, when he cut “Blowin’ in the Wind” from his set list and instead closed with Frank Sinatra’s 1964 song “Stay With Me,” written by Carolyn Leigh and Jerome Moross. Nobody knew it […]

Just when we thought Dylan couldn’t surprise us with any more curveballs, he released a Christmas record. At the centerpiece of 2009’s Christmas in the Heart is a polka-meets-klezmer version of “Must Be Santa,” taking its zany inspiration from an earlier cover by the Texas outfit Brave Combo. In a bonkers video directed by Nash […]


Dylan toured with Merle Haggard in 2005, which might be why he chose to write a sequel to Haggard’s upbeat 1969 blues stomper for Modern Times the following year. While Haggard chose to write about a working-class family man who gets through the weeks by blowing off steam in the tavern on the weekends, Dylan […]

The romantic ballad “Autumn Leaves” has been recorded by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Bing Crosby to Nat King Cole and Doris Day — but all of those artists tackled the song before the age of 50. When Dylan recorded it for 2015’s Shadows in the Night, it took on a whole new meaning. Here’s […]

Dylan was always a hip-hop head — ever since he spat bars on old-school rap legend Kurtis Blow’s “Street Rock” in the Eighties. In his memoir, Chronicles, he raves about getting his mind blown by N.W.A, Public Enemy, and Ice-T. “These guys weren’t standing around bullshitting,” Dylan wrote. “They were beating drums, tearing it up, […]

By 2001, Dylan had been playing around with blues forms for 40-odd years. But he’d rarely sounded like he was having more fun with the genre than he did on “Lonesome Day Blues,” a loose and raucous 12-bar shuffle in the spirit of classics like “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” where he throws narrative out the window […]

For many fans, the three-CD set of standards Triplicate felt like absurd overkill coming after two previous volumes that covered the same territory. But it has plenty of fascinating moments. Dylan ends its long journey with a somberly searching torch song originally written in 1929 by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, and recorded by Frank […]

At many of his concerts in the 2010s, Dylan would play this song onstage in front of a background that looked like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. It matched the feeling of this soulful track, which recalls Fifties doo-wop before it turns into a murder ballad. (Fans have noticed that the song sounds a lot like […]

“I’d make this record no matter what was going on in the world,” Dylan told Rolling Stone in 2006 about Modern Times. “I wrote these songs in not a meditative state at all, but more like in a trancelike, hypnotic state.” That trancelike feeling defines “Spirit on the Water,” a nearly eight-minute love song where […]

Like most of 2009’s Together Through Life, “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’“ was co-written with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. It opens the album with a shadowy image of last-ditch romance as guard and guide in a barren world. With Mike Campbell’s guitar lashing against rumbling drums, and the forlorn feel of Donnie Herron’s trumpet and […]

Dylan wrote a series of soundtrack songs for films between Love and Theft and Modern Times. Perhaps the best is “Tell Ol’ Bill,” which he wrote for the film North Country, starring Charlize Theron. With a title that goes back to 1927 and a melody that may have been inspired by the Carter Family, Dylan […]

Over a descending chord progression that becomes relentlessly more intense, Dylan surveys the wreckage of a messy life. Regrets, he has a few: The love that he shared with someone else has long slipped away, those close to him are gone, and even his enemies are dead. It sounds a lot like The Irishman. The […]

A bookend of sorts to “Murder Most Foul,” the contemplative scene-setter that opens Rough and Rowdy Ways is another song where Dylan seems to be considering his place in the constellation of great musicians and artists through the ages. This time, the man of many moods is in a more playful one. He shouts out […]

“Ever since the British burned the White House down” — that would be the War of 1812, history fans — “there’s a bleeding wound in the heart of town.” That’s where Dylan locates “Narrow Way,” a highlight from Tempest. The song has the edge of his most caustic Sixties putdowns, back when his idea of […]

One needs to know nothing about the 2007 box-office bomb Lucky You to become enchanted by the aching beauty of “Huck’s Tune,” even though Dylan wrote it specifically for the movie and it makes explicit references to characters and plot developments. Divorced from that context, the lush, dreamy song becomes about the tragedy of sacrificing […]

Can’t you hear that Duquesne whistle blowing — and more importantly, what’s it trying to tell you? The deceptively jaunty Robert Hunter co-write that opens Tempest dances around all kinds of high-minded and low-down possibilities for what its central image represents without settling on an answer. Half the time, the whistle sounds like the last […]

As Dylan reclaimed control of his music, he pushed toward a sound in his head that dated back to the Forties and Fifties — a band playing live in a room, ideally all into the same microphone. “Thunder on the Mountain” enters with an unmistakably live flourish of splashing cymbals and blues licks before kicking […]

The weariness Dylan sings about in the somber folk blues “Nettie Moore” is archetypal, pulling in references from Marshall S. Pike and James Lord Piermont’s 1857 song “Gentle Nettie Moore” and the folk traditional “Moonshiner.” But it hits home because it feels so personal: He sings about being a singer “in a cowboy band,” wandering […]

Dylan usually feels right at home in the dark. But in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” he goes all the way into “the land of light” for the nine-minute accordion ballad of a grizzled outlaw hiding out in Florida, hounded by his memories. It’s a stunner from the new album — and one of Dylan’s most […]

The relentlessly vicious “Pay in Blood” felt shocking when it came out, and a decade later it ranks among Dylan’s most searingly prophetic moments, an image of dumb, evil power flexing its amoral muscle on the neck of the weak. “I pay in blood, but not my own,” he growls, licking his chops as the […]

“To me it’s not nostalgic,” Dylan retorted, forever prickly, when an interviewer used that word in reference to the 17-minute song he released in the spring of 2020. “I don’t think of ‘Murder Most Foul’ as a glorification of the past or some kind of send-off to a lost age. It speaks to me in […]

“Mississippi,” God damn. Precisely what befell Dylan’s narrator during his ill-fated extra 24 hours in the deep South remains unclear — just as we never really learned what was bugging that guy who got marooned in Mobile, Alabama. Dylan wrote “Mississippi” in the Nineties and took at least two wildly different shots at the song […]

Dylan has a long history of wrapping up albums with epic-length, lonesome-sounding songs, from “Desolation Row” in 1965 (11:21) and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” in 1966 (11:22) to “Highlands” in 1997 (16:31). “Ain’t Talkin’” is short by those standards (a mere 8:48), but in that time it packs allusions to bluegrass duo the Stanley […]

The Mississippi River flooded in 1927, devastating landscapes all across the South, killing 500 people, and causing more than $1 trillion of damage in today’s dollars. Blues musicians throughout the region wrote songs about the tragedy, including Memphis Minnie (“When the Levee Breaks”), Bessie Smith (“Backwater Blues”), Barbecue Bob (“Mississippi Heavy Water Blues”), and Charley […]

Dylan sounded like he was singing from halfway into the grave on 1997’s Time Out of Mind, but he was, like, so much older then. The effortless feel of the playful-yet-ominous, hard-grooving, utterly dazzling “Things Have Changed” was an early indication of the renewed friskiness of Dylan’s 21st-century work — and the vividly live-in-the studio […]