In a macabre narrative called “My Own Version of You,” Dylan sings about playing god as he scavenges through morgues and cemeteries to reanimate a few notable corpses and absorb their knowledge. But for all his allusions to history and literature, the writing drifts toward uncertainty. (In that same Times interview, he is asked whether the coronavirus could be seen as a biblical reckoning-a difficult question to imagine posing to any other living musician.) We have learned to come to Dylan with these types of quandaries, and more often than not, we have left satisfied. Still, he is Bob Dylan, and we are trained to dig deeper. So when he sings about crossing the Rubicon, he’s talking about a river in Italy when he tells you he’s going down to Key West, he wants you to know he’s dressing for the weather. “The lyrics are the real thing, tangible, they’re not metaphors,” Dylan told the New York Times. And love is not a Shakespearean riddle or a lusty joke it is a delicate pact between two people, something you make up your mind and devote yourself to. In these songs, death is not a heavy fog hanging over all walks of life it is a man being murdered as the country watches, an event with a time, place, and date. In other words, it is the rare Dylan album that asks to be understood, that comes down to meet its audience. The rest of the album follows this thread: furnished with more space than his words require, sung gracefully at the age of 79, speaking to things we know to be true, using proper nouns and first-hand evidence.
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