Sunday Listening: Bob Dylan Releases New Song For The First Time In 8 Years & It's A 17 Minute Journey

From a message attached to the song on Bob Dylan's official website:

Greeting to my friends and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty across the years. 

This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. 

Stay safe, stay observant and may God be with you. 

From The New Yorker:

What a weird new song for Bob Dylan to drop—and what better time to drop it. “Weird” with its full Shakespearean force, as in the “weird sisters” of “Macbeth,” possessing “the supernatural power of dealing with fate or destiny.” And “new”—well, new to us, at any rate.

I'm not going to pretend I've got any businesses critiquing music but some of the lines, especially the first few, are so 'on the nose' I felt like a high school kid writing a poem for history class could have penned them. I agreed with Kevin Dettmar, author of that New Yorker article, that the first half of the song was disappointing and found myself kind of cringing at the corniness of it, but I reminded myself it was Bob Dylan so there must be something wrong with me. (ha). As the song went on though I thought it was pretty cool. It's sort of a journey through 60s & 70s pop culture & music and it's just a chill, interesting tune. 

Is it going on my playlist? No. But I think it's great that artists like him know we're in strange, stir-crazy times & are hungry for any sort of mind transporting entertainment. Musicians are putting out unreleased tracks, hosting drive-in and online concerts and there's even 'raves' you can join on platforms like Twitch. The famous Metropolitan Opera house has been streaming their best works in the evenings, and if you're slightly lower-brow DJ/comedian/singer Marc Rebillet's been doing a live Quaranstreams show where callers talk to him, suggest a topic, and he makes up a banger of a song for them on the spot. 

To close out on this rainy day in NYC I'll give you some Shelter From The Storm. This is my favorite version; it just gets better & better as it goes on: