Can we ever expect another new Bob Dylan album?
Bob Dylan has just quietly wrapped up his Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour. However, many among his fanbase believed that the tour was over this time last year when Dylan was about to embark on The Outlaw Tour with Willie Nelson, and again at the end of 2024, when the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour wrapped up a trip through Europe.
Originally slated to run from 2022 to 2025, and then updated to span 2021 to 2024, Dylan has now played a staggering 250 shows in support of his latest album since getting back on the road after the pandemic. While he has mixed in plenty of fan favourites like ‘All Along the Watchtower’, ‘Desolation Row’, ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’, and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ with some deeper cuts like ‘To Be Alone With You’, ‘Watching the River Flow’ and ‘Every Grain of Sand’, he has also thrown in covers like ‘Born in Chicago’, ‘Brokedown Palace’, ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’, ‘Johnny B Goode’ and even a verse of Billy Joel’s ‘New York State of Mind’. Understandably, though, it has been his latest album, the masterpiece Rough and Rowdy Ways, that has remained the centrepiece and focal point of the tour.
True to form, Dylan hasn’t just played the songs straight, though. From the very first shows, he was tinkering with the lyrics and the arrangements of his newest songs. He’s taken them all apart, looked at all the pieces and experimented with what else he could make of them along the way. Some nights, he has even drastically reinvented the songs from one night to the next, turning ‘My Own Version of You’ from a slow crawl into a runaway rocker at two consecutive shows in Florida early last year.
While some songs have seen more reinventions than others (here’s looking at you, ‘Key West’), one thing has been consistent across every performance: the level of dedication and commitment Dylan has given to all of the songs. He has put on some of his most dazzling vocal displays in decades and taken his piano playing to another level to really put them over. In amongst all that, he’s been cracking jokes with the audience, playfully laughing with his band, and even doing a little dancing—in his own way—at times. Dylan seems to be having the time of his life on stage right now, and if you’ve been in any of his audiences over the last five years, you’ll have been having the time of your life as well.
One song played at the first few shows back from the enforced pandemic break, ‘Early Roman Kings’, contains the defiant lyric “I ain’t dead yet, my bell still rings”. Though Dylan hasn’t been singing the song lately, the sentiment has clearly remained true.
While Dylan has been so focused on showcasing his last album, rumours of another one have been few and far between, though there have been whispers. As far back as 2023, claims surfaced online that Dylan had been back in the studio recording new material, though nothing has come of them yet. Meanwhile, other sources throughout 2024 claimed Dylan had continued to hit the studio between tours and built up a bank of songs that could contribute to a future album. Despite all the talk of new original material, nothing concrete has materialised yet, and the idea that he has spent a year tinkering in the studio doesn’t much fit with his usual working style of getting all the tracks down over a few highly productive sessions.
If it were not for the soundtrack album Shadow Kingdom, we would now be entering into the longest gap between Dylan albums in his entire career, but it is hardly a surprise that a man who is rapidly approaching his mid-80s would be slower in writing, recording and releasing new material. But Dylan is an endlessly creative, inventive and restless artist. There is no doubt that as long as he is alive, he will be creating, whether that is in the recording studio, on the stage, or wherever it is that he does all his paintings, ironwork, sculpting and whiskey-brewing.
Alongside the occasional whispers and rumours regarding new original material, the most recent recordings Dylan has made that are known about have been for T-Bone Burnett’s Ionic Originals series, where he re-recorded unique versions of his songs ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘Masters of War’, ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ and ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’, though the majority of these have not been made publicly available, as well as his cover of Cole Porter’s ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, which was recorded in 2023 for the recent Dennis Quad-led Reagan biopic. It’s also rumoured that Dylan has been in the studio to duet with Barbara Streisand as part of her upcoming album which will also feature collaborations with Paul McCartney, James Taylor, Hozier and Ariana Grande, but neither the song that they sung together or even a release date for that album have yet been confirmed.
So it seems that Dylan really has spent plenty of time in the studio lately, even if nothing completely new has been released from the various sessions yet, and there is no doubting that he has more than enough gas in the tank to keep creating (and re-creating) night after night on the stage. He’s booked for almost 40 more shows on the Outlaw Tour this summer, but then after that, who knows? Maybe he’ll finally take some of that energy and creativity back into the studio and give us at least one more masterpiece while his bell is still ringing.
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