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Bob Dylan’s surprise song Murder Most Foul is apt for a world living in fear

Murder Most Foul is the first new music from Bob Dylan in eight years
Murder Most Foul is the first new music from Bob Dylan in eight years Credit: Ki Price/Reuters

The world woke up to a new song by Bob Dylan, his first original work in eight years. Murder Most Foul is a weird, ungainly, nearly 17-minute-long elegiac ramble through the death of the American dream.

Dylan’s song was clearly not inspired by the coronavirus pandemic, yet its surprise release has been. A simple message on his website accompanying its release offered thanks to his fans for all their support and loyalty across the years, and urged them to “stay safe, stay observant and may God be with you.”

Murder Most Foul takes it cue from the assassination of President Kennedy. “Twas a dark day in Dallas, November 63 / A day that would live on in infamy,” Dylan sings, adopting the formal tone of a folk ballad, a style with which he has over the decades, blending news with fiction, mixing unreliable facts with flights of fantasy. “President Kennedy was a-ridin’ high / Good day to be living and a good day to die.”

Dylan moves back and forwards from “the day they blew out the brains of a king,” to ruminate on the changes wrought on America in its wake. Over a slowly, stately almost funereal piano (presumably played by Dylan himself, given its wayward timing) he sings in an old, worn, wise voice of things he has witnessed and things he has felt and things he has just imagined. “The day that they killed him, a man said to me, son / The age of the Antichrist has just only begun.”

Very light drums keep pace and sometimes swell with shivers of cymbals. A violin gently ripples the air, a double bass moves beneath in a loose arrangement that is all tone and mood, with little sense of structure or urgency. Dylan’s rhyming scheme and metre are simplistic to the point of banality, just a series of blues couplets one after another, often made up half remembered catch phrases, people’s names, and references to other songs. “Wolfman, oh Wolfman, oh Wolfman howl / Rub-a-dub-dub it’s murder most foul.”

There are lines that will make Dylan sceptics snort with derision. Can this really be the work of the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature? Dylan may no longer have access to the dazzling and explosive verbal imagery that fueled his early ascent, and yet age and experience lend a different kind of weight to his voice and words. The effect of all these thoughts and images piled relentlessly upon one another becomes increasingly intense and mesmeric, as Dylan breaks the narrative timeline and conjures an almost hallucinatory vision of the impact of a national tragedy, when “the soul of a nation has been torn away / And it’s beginning to go into slow decay.” 

In verses full of puns and allusions, Dylan references the music unleashed as a new generation took hold of the airwaves: “Hush little children, you’ll understand / The Beatles are coming, they’re gonna hold your hand.” The Wolfman referred to is early rock ’n’ roll radio maverick Wolfman Jack, and Dylan calls out a relentless playlist of all the songs he wants to hear to salve his soul, the sound of the 1960s taking hold, whilst constantly switching back to the tragedy itself. “Play Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood / Play it for the First Lady, she ain’t feeling too good.”

Sometimes Dylan is a witness to unfolding events, sometimes he is revisiting the scene of the crime, sometimes he in the car with the first couple, driving towards doom: “Ridin’ in the back seat with my wife / Headin’ straight on into the afterlife.” He references Woodstock, Altamont, The Who’s Tommy and, more incongruously, 1970s stars Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles and Billy Joel, early 20th-century icons including Houdini and Buster Keaton amidst notorious gangsters, jazz trumpeters, Shakespeare quotes and the King James Bible. It’s a song of an America that was lost, and an America being convulsively reborn.

There is no information about when the track was composed. Dylan himself just described it as “an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting.” The simple, spacious arrangement is similar to that which Dylan been using live in recent years, whilst the old croak has a tone and timbre akin to the sound of his many albums of Sinatra covers released during the past decade.

There have been rumours that Dylan has been working on new material, but it is entirely possible that this was a leftover from his last original album, 2012’s The Tempest. (The title track of that album was another very long song reimagining a historic event, in that case the sinking of the Titanic). It also bears comparison to his classic 1980s outtake, Blind Willie McTell.

What seems apparent is that, during this latest crisis, Dylan felt a resonance to another moment when America fell into shocked silence, perhaps the defining moment of Dylan’s generation, inspiring him to release this song from the vaults. At this strange, scary and transformative moment in history, it is a song that serves to remind us that we have actually been here before. In its dark theme, and somber tone, it may not be particularly comforting or hopeful but it will bring succour to Dylan’s legions of admirers nonetheless.

“Death will come when it comes,” Dylan sings, with the stoic indifference of age and wisdom. The song shows there’s life in the old troubadour yet. 

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