The Endurance of Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways

The Pitchfork Review

Pitchfork

Music, Music Commentary, Music Interviews, Music History

3.3 • 844 Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2020

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On June 19th, Bob Dylan released his 39th album, Rough and Rowdy Ways -- his first full length album of original songs in nearly a decade. Throughout his career, Dylan has followed moments of silence with something wholly new. In the mid-sixties, after a motorcycle accident brought Dylan’s creative and popular explosion to a halt, he retreated for a year and a half. Then, he released John Wesley Harding -- a stark and simple album with standouts like “All Along the Watchtower” and “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.” Thirty years later, Dylan released Time Out of Mind, after years of doing mostly folk cover albums. Time Out of Mind, produced by Daniel Lanois, had an atmospheric and dark quality never heard before in Dylan’s previous work. Similarly, Rough and Rowdy Ways sees Dylan breaking new ground again. Pitchfork Editor Puja Patel is joined by Staff Writer Sam Sodomsky and Contributing Editor Andy Cush as they break down Dylan’s comeback albums and discuss his most recent album.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Pitchfork Review.
0:04.9	I'm Pudra Patel, the editor of Pitchfork, and I'm here with our staff writer, Sam Saddamski.
0:09.6	Hey, everyone.
0:10.5	And contributing editor Andy Push.
0:12.5	Hey, guys.
0:13.8	So this episode, we're talking about Bob Dylan, who released a new album called Rough and Rowdy Ways last month.
0:20.1	He's had multiple
0:20.9	comebacks in his career, and after each one of them, we've really heard his music evolve.
0:25.6	So we're going to talk about Rough and Rowdy Ways later this episode. But first, we're
0:29.6	going to focus on some other comeback albums from Dylan's career. We're going to start with
0:34.1	John Wesley Harding, which was released in 1967.
0:43.9	So Sam, I know that John Wesley Harding is one of your favorite Dylan albums.
0:48.3	Why do you consider that a comeback album of sorts?
0:58.4	So Dylan in the mid-60s is like this total whirlwind of creativity and music but it sort of comes to a halt with this motorcycle accident that is sort of seen as like this moment of rebirth for him where he
1:06.9	takes it was just like a little over a year and a half or so. He decamps in Woodstock
1:13.6	and somewhere in there writes and records the record John Wesley Harding that sort of comes out
1:20.4	of nowhere and is seen as his return from the motorcycle accident. In some ways, it was almost like a surprise drop.
1:29.2	There was no pre-release single.
1:30.8	It just kind of showed up in stores, and Dylan didn't really do any interviews around it.
1:37.1	So it was sort of his way of avoiding the whole rollout that's associated with an artist like him,
1:44.0	who's kind of at the peak of their popularity,
1:46.2	coming back after what was for him an unprecedented amount of time away.
	...

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