Bob Dylan - new album just out on Tidal - Rough and Rowdy Ways

Just been streaming it on Qobuz in hires.
First track did not move me, in fact it nearly made me want to turn it off.
Fortunately I persevered and things improved a lot.
Will I buy it?
Probably not though......

I really enjoyed it.  His singing is more straightforward and his poetry and subject matter are still weighty and the music itself is enjoyable.  I like the elder Bob more in some ways than the young Bob.  Blood on the Tracks will always be my favorite, but I also really enjoy Time Out of Mind.  There's a lot more gravitas to some of his later work.

I’m a big Dylan fan, but some of his later releases have been hard to become attached to as opposed to Highway 61, Blond on Blond, or Blood on the Tracks, his work with The Band, etc. Yea, I know, old stuff.

I’ll tell you though, I last saw Bob was around 2000ish. Natalie Merchant opened, and to be honest, I went more for Natalie than for Bob, but he and his band kicked butt, and he ‘blew me away’. Unfortunately his albums at that time seemed inconsistent, and really were not recorded/engineered (perhaps over engineered) well. So, I’ve really not paid much attention since Modern Times.

OK, this album; actually, I enjoyed it, probably because he did strip it down more bare. perhaps that’s where Bob is right now in his life, just concentrating on his poetry and lyrics more than the actual music. Unfortunately that also shows. It all started sounding the same. Great lyrics and poetry (as usual and expected), but the music seems like an excuse to make an album instead of a book.

As I was listening I kept thinking of Leonard Cohen. Leonard has made many albums this same way, but to me, there was usually still a greater musical diversity no matter how ‘simple’ in accompaniment. Do we really need another Cohen?

A lot of his later stuff is overly compressed, I look for cassettes like Time out of Mind, Love and Theft but the one I really want, Modern Times, is only available from Russia, at some insane price. I met Paul Clayton a long time ago in Charlottesville, he was Dylan’s best friend in the early Village years. Clayton was a dulcimer player and singer of sea chanties.

https://youtu.be/oi8_n3kM-Dk