Columbia RecordsAfter dropping two unexpected songs over the past few weeks — “Murder Most Foul” and “I Contain Multitudes” — Bob Dylan has another surprise: a new album.
Rough and Rowdy Ways will be out June 19; it’s available for pre-order now. A new song from the project, “False Prophet,” is also available now.
In the song, a super-gravelly, somewhat menacing Dylan sings over a simple bluesy riff, “Well I’m the enemy of treason/Enemy of strife/Enemy of the unlived meaningless life/I ain’t no false prophet/I just know what I know/I go where only the lonely kind go.”
“I Contain Multitudes” and the nearly 17-minute-long “Murder Most Foul” are also included on the album, which is Dylan’s first collection of original material in eight years, and his first since he received the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature: He’s the only songwriter in history ever to do so.
The album’s title is likely inspired by a 1929 song called “My Rough and Rowdy Ways” by Jimmie Rodgers, a singer/songwriter known as “The Singing Brakeman” who is often considered to be “The Father of Country Music.”
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