Rough and Rowdy Ways
| Bob Dylan
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Rough and Rowdy Ways
Rough and Rowdy Ways is the 39th studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on June 19, 2020 by Columbia Records. It is Dylan's first album of original songs since his 2012 album Tempest, following three releases, one a triple album, that covered traditional pop standards. It features contributions from several musicians, including Fiona Apple, Benmont Tench and Alan Pasqua. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Rolling Stone
At 79, he’s still channeling cosmic American mysteries like no one else in music.
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NME
arguably his grandest poetic statement yet.
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Los Angeles Times
Bob Dylan’s ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ is a savage pulp-noir masterpiece.
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Pitchfork
Six decades into his career, Bob Dylan delivers a gorgeous and meticulous record. It is the rare Dylan album that asks to be understood and comes down to meet its audience.
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Mojo
Call it a vaccine against culture’s shrinking expectations and the subsequent sapping of spirit. or just call it great music.
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The Guardian
enthralling, mischievous – and very male.
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Variety
In one musical work, Dylan distills a vast and lifelong sense of exploration, as somebody who’s discovering not just the links between Kennedy and his assassins but between King James and Etta James, Beethoven and Warren Zevon, and finally, in the last line, his two favorite sources, Shakespeare and the Gospel.
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The Atlantic
Rough and Rowdy Ways, the singer’s first album of original music in years, reminds an anxious nation that all things are eventually doomed.
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The Irish Times
A menacing and playful return.
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ABC News
Dylan's 'Rough and Rowdy Ways' masterful, reflective.
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Uncut
when the result is as powerful as Rough And Rowdy Ways, the method seems more like a kind of justifiable artistic alchemy.
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Untold Dylan
Rough And Rowdy Ways should be played for days. Not to mention months or years. Definitely worthy of all the attention it received. If this doesn’t win album of the year then this world is dying. And it will feel like it’s hardly been born, in that case.
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The Wall Street Journal
Bob Dylan’s latest album finds him in an elegiac, yet playful and funny, frame of mind.
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The Arts Desk
Bob returns with an unadulturated, stone-cold masterpiece.
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Sputnik Music
By mixing slow ballads with bluesy rock songs, and dry wit with honest reflection, Bob Dylan proves he really does contain multitudes.
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Consequence of Sound
Dylan can still make a Bob Dylan album. There’s enough evidence of that on Rough and Rowdy Ways.
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Daily Mail
Dylan knows his music history, but he’s not adding to it any more. A colossus who once changed the world with his art has settled for making collages.
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Slant Magazine
The album encompasses the infinite potential for grace and disaster during the most turbulent of ages.
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Stereogum
He may not have conceived Rough And Rowdy Ways as his last will and testament. Hopefully, there are more masterpieces to come.
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Backseat Mafia
For a man approaching his eighties, Rough and Rowdy Ways is unbelievably sprightly and bursting with innovation.
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Brooklyn Vegan
‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ is a late-career triumph.
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Paste Magazine
Iconic singer is at his most Dylan-esque on 39th studio LP.
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Ultimate Classic Rock
It's Shakespearean in both its influence and breadth, and if it ends up Bob Dylan's last masterpiece, it's fitting. No other artist has surveyed his time and place with such insight and wit while carving out a legacy one well-timed work at a time.
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Vulture
Bob Dylan Is Still the Voice of a Generation.
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The Washington Post
“Rough and Rowdy Ways,” gives us a fresh opportunity to genuflect before a great seer of American song .
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All Music
Rough and Rowdy Ways is akin to transformational albums such as Love and Theft, and Slow Train Coming. It's a portrait of the artist in winter who remains vital and enigmatic. At nearly 80, Dylan's pen and guitar case still hold plenty of magic.
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The Morton Report
So it seemed reasonable to suspect that we’d seen the last of his greatest albums. But if that’s what you concluded, well, here comes Rough and Rowdy Ways, a superb collection of 10 new originals, to prove you wrong.
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The Telegraph
one long, magnificent riddle for his most loyal fans.
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The Wee Review
Rough And Rowdy Ways is of a piece with everything he’s done in the past 25 years, an exploration of anachronistic music and ancient truths. It’s like he’s held the best of that era back to give us now as a tonic, in lieu of any pronouncement on the state of the world. It has a universal wisdom and an artistry that will outlive contemporary mores.
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The Upcoming
Rough and Rowdy Ways shows that Dylan has certainly not lost his way.
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mxdwn
Bob Dylan’s new album seems like Dylan embarking his greatest wisdom onto the world in his last days. His words will not be taken lightly.
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inews
It’s casual, metaphysical, full of detail, wonderfully sung, with Dylan making his spring-heeled way through a plethora of times, faces and places.
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The Fire Note
Taken as a whole, Rough and Rowdy Ways, is a remarkable undertaking, something fresh and unexpected from an artist whose lengthy career has been an exercise in reinvention, breaking every preconceived notion of what was expected of him.
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The Young Folks
Much of Rough and Rowdy Ways can feel scattered, as Dylan harnesses his “trance writing” and seems to write whatever comes to him for a stanza at a time. However, when he’s relatively focused—such as in “Murder Most Foul” or “I’ve Made Up My Mind…”—and when his voice is highlighted well, the album can offer listeners that unique Bob Dylan experience they value.
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No Ripcord
And as it is with his most defining works, Rough and Rowdy Ways will have us trying to decipher and untangle Dylan's thoughts for sixty more to come. But the one thing he wants to make clear above all else, even when contemplating his mortality and the transcience of life, is that he's far from writing his obituary.
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Independent
Rough And Rowdy Ways is a menage a trois of tragedy, comedy and mortality. There's one last great album in him down on Desolation Row, too.
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The Musical Hype
All in all, Rough and Rowdy Ways is by far the best Bob Dylan album in years. Perhaps that goes without saying considering his last album of originals prior to this was Tempest (2012), but Rough and Rowdy Ways just feels special.
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Vinyl Chapters
An album bookended by slow and reflective poetry, with a mix of tunes in the middle that’ll please Dylan fans of all eras, Rough and Rowdy Ways is as autobiographical as an album gets. I’d be happy if this is his last release, it is a fitting farewell and perfect in every way.
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Chicago Tribune
Bob Dylan’s ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ is a savage pulp-noir masterpiece.
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Steemkr
There is no doubt that Rough and Rowdy Ways is one of his best and most diverse projects. Particularly speaking, this is also the album that has the most reflective power and will force (in a good way) listeners to try a new way of listening to music.
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Radio 13
Rough and Rowdy Ways contains some of his most memorable song writing moments in decades and shows that despite his age he has lost none of his spark musically.
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Pop Goes the Weasel
Like Dylan himself, the album is awkward, perplexing, fascinating, funny, difficult and singularly unique.
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The Arts Desk
Bob returns with an unadulturated, stone-cold masterpiece.
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The Guardian
a testament to his eternal greatness.
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The Times
Considered, elegiac and richly allusive, this austere gem may be Dylan’s best album in 40 years.
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Sungenre
At 79 years old, Dylan manages to craft his songs as strong as he ever has, which makes one wonder, not just about how his historical missteps came to be, but why every artist can’t be this enduring.
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seattlepi
'Rough and Rowdy Ways' Delivers Classic Bob Dylan.
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Gigwise
Pretty but redundant songwriting from an artist who no longer has his finger on the pulse.
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Audioxide
Rough and Rowdy Ways is a good Bob Dylan album, but to compare it to his best seems premature. And ever so slightly ludicrous.
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The Line of Best Fit
Rough and Rowdy Ways is long, intricately woven and illuminating as a medieval tapestry, and just as precious. It’ll make you cry, it’ll make you tear your hair out, it’ll make you gasp with awe.
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Pop Culture Beast
While not quite the masterpiece that critics are claiming it to be, Rough And Rowdy Ways is a good album from Bob Dylan. While I find myself preferring Tempest over this, Rough And Rowdy Ways is still worth a listen.
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13th Floor
Who would have thought that at age 79, ol’ Bob would serve up another masterpiece. But that’s just what he’s done.
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musicOMH
If Rough And Rowdy Ways ends up being his last major work, it’s a hell of a way to bow out.
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Folk Radio
Rough And Rowdy Ways cannot be categorized simply as a late period success, it is so much more than that. It defies age, suggesting that we look beyond easy answers and keep trying to understand how we relate to an ever-changing world.
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Stereoboard
It’s music to ponder and, in these uncertain times, he has treated us to an album with immense weight and depth, which might be his best work this side of the millennium.
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Slate
The Nobel winner’s latest is a masterful (and crude) collage from our greatest remix artist.
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The West Australian
Bob Dylan’s new album Rough and Rowdy Ways perfectly sums up our times.
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Counterfire
On Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan, mad scientist, has given us ten more of his own necromantic songs—and I believe in them.
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Spin
Bob Dylan's new album paints a new masterpiece.
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Clash Magazine
A record shadowed by death and fuelled by rage, it’s the work of someone who says he sleeps “with life and death in the same bed...” An artist haunted by the prospect of his passing while still facing down new challenges, Bob Dylan remains above all else a student of America.
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