LEGENDARY US folk singer Bob Dylan will today release his first album of original songs in eight years with the 10-track Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Dylan’s 39th studio album features a 17-minute ballad about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as well as a tribute to American electric bluesman Jimmy Reed.

Rough and Rowdy Ways is the Nobel winner’s first collection of new material since Tempest in 2012, although he has released a number of cover albums in the interim.

It sees Dylan mixing bluesy riffs with folksy storytelling, his signature raspy voice delivering lyrics that switch between bleakly haunting and darkly humorous.

At times, he sounds warm. In other moments, scathing.

In the album’s opening song I Contain Multitudes, the 79-year-old grapples with mortality.

He starts by singing tenderly: “Today and tomorrow and yesterday, too/The flowers are dying like all things do.”

Later, he says: “I sleep with life and death in the same bed.”

Dylan was asked about the lyrics in a recent interview with The New York Times, his first since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.

“I think about the death of the human race. The long strange trip of the naked ape,” he said.

“Not to be light on it, but everybody’s life is so transient. Every human being, no matter how strong or mighty, is frail when it comes to death. I think about it in general terms, not in a personal way.”

The songs run through 20th-century pop culture, touch on myths and refer to historical and fictional figures – some light, others tragic.

In I Contain Multitudes, Dylan cites Indiana Jones, Anne Frank and The Rolling Stones in the same verse.

Murder Most Foul, first revealed in March, retells the shooting of president Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, while describing the evolution of 1960s counterculture.

Despite his ageing years, Dylan, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2012, has toured almost non-stop for the past three decades.

The coronavirus crisis forced him to cancel a string of dates in Japan and North America this spring and summer, but he has promised to be back on the road as soon as it is safe to do so. – AFP, June 19, 2020.