Weekly Briefing: Bob Dylan

The current tour came into better focus through repetition rather than surprise. Midbrow’s Boston review and Cult Following’s Richmond report described shows drawing from recent work, older songs in altered forms, and covers associated with Bo Diddley, Bobby Bland, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Both accounts placed “I Shall Be Released” at the end. Two shows do not establish an immutable design, but the overlap suggests that the tour is developing a recognizable musical grammar.

That grammar is more revealing than any individual setlist change. In Boston, Julian Lage and Joel Paterson helped give the band a jazz-inflected texture, while “When I Paint My Masterpiece” appeared in what Midbrow described as a jazz-noir arrangement. The set remained stable enough to be identifiable yet flexible enough to avoid becoming a catalog recital. Dylan’s present live method is therefore less about constant substitution than about continuing to alter the character of songs within a relatively settled frame.

The historical conversation was dominated by the moment when that freedom was first asserted. American Songwriter revisited the July 1965 release of “Like a Rolling Stone”; Guitar World returned to Robbie Robertson’s memories of the hostile 1966 electric tour; and reporting on Robert Gordon’s Newport & the Great Folk Dream highlighted newly accessible footage from the 1963–66 festivals. Separate assessments of Blonde on Blonde, Manchester, Forest Hills, and Highway 61 Revisited reinforced the same account of an artist breaking with an audience’s preferred version of him.

More revealing than the quantity of that coverage was its proximity to the current tour. Today’s rearrangements no longer provoke the sense of betrayal attached to Newport or Manchester, but they are still interpreted through that history. The electric transition has become more than a career episode: it is the precedent that makes later revision seem intrinsic to Dylan’s work. The past does not merely overshadow the present show; it supplies the critical language used to understand it.

The week’s writing about other artists made a related point from another direction. Guitar Player traced the Dylan-connected folk-rock environment behind the electric overdub of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence,” while Houston Press revisited the exchange of ideas between Dylan and the Beatles. Pieces on Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, the Traveling Wilburys, and Paul McCartney added breadth. Taken together, they portrayed Dylan’s influence not as a one-way line of descent but as a network of rivalry, borrowing, admiration, and reinterpretation. That is an established history rather than a new consensus, but its recurrence explains why Dylan remains so difficult to isolate from the wider story of postwar songwriting.

A useful distinction this week was between the date of publication and the date of the underlying event. Newly surfaced pieces included an account of a 2016 Forest Hills concert and a report built around a late-2000s album rumor. Other articles revisited decades-old performances, interviews, and recording sessions. This material can be valuable, but its circulation created an impression of activity that was not matched by contemporary announcements. The week was busy in commentary, not in structural change.

The most unusual possible new thread remains provisional. Europesays reported that Pope Leo quoted Dylan’s unrecorded 1963 antiwar lyric “Go Away You Bomb” in the foreword to a peace anthology. If confirmed through the anthology or authoritative Vatican and archival sources, the quotation would give an unpublished early song a distinctive public afterlife in religious and peace-oriented discourse. For now, it stands alongside the reported discovery of an “I’m Not There” draft: intriguing, potentially consequential, but not yet documented strongly enough to carry the weight of an archival breakthrough.