NEW YORK: US folk and rock legend Bob Dylan released his first album of original songs in eight years on Friday with the ten-track “Rough and Rowdy Ways.”
Dylan’s 39th studio album, which comes 58 years after his first, 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 mix gritty blues with folksy storytelling, his signature raspy voice delivering lyrics that switch between bleakly haunting and darkly humorous.
At times he sounds warm, at other times 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 replied.
“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.
The song, which rose to the top of the Billboard chart, is packed with artist name-drops including the Eagles, Charlie Parker, Stevie Nicks, Woodstock and The Beatles.
Dylan — some of whose most-loved songs from the 1960s and 70s addressed police brutality and racism, such as “Hurricane” — also mentions the Tulsa race massacre of 1921.
The “Birdman of Alcatraz,” a convicted murderer who became a respected ornithologist raising birds in prison, gets a mention, too.
Recounting Kennedy’s slaying, Dylan sings: “We’re gonna kill you with hatred, without any respect / We’ll mock you and shock you and we’ll put it in your face / We’ve already got someone here to take your place.”
In “False Prophet,” the album’s six-minute second track, Dylan sounds cocky and unapologetic as he addresses his own mythology.
“I ain’t no false prophet / I just said what I said / I’m just here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head,” he sings over a slow blues riff.
British music magazine NME called the album “arguably his grandest poetic statement yet.”
In a review on its website, critic Mark Beaumont wrote “Rough? Perhaps, but it certainly has the warmth and lustre of the intimate and home-made.”
Rolling Stone magazine hailed it an “absolute classic,” calling it one of Dylan’s “most timely albums ever.”
“As Dylan pushes 80, his creative vitality remains startling — and a little frightening,” wrote critic Rob Sheffield.
Despite his years, Dylan, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from 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’s safe to do so.
Bob Dylan releases first original album in almost a decade
https://arab.news/wvc7r
Bob Dylan releases first original album in almost a decade
- Dylan’s 39th studio album comes 58 years after his first
- “Rough and Rowdy Ways” is the Nobel winner’s first collection of new material since “Tempest” in 2012
Kawthar Al-Atiyah: ‘My paintings speak first to the body, then to the mind’
- The Saudi artist discusses her creative process and her responsibility to ‘represent Saudi culture’
RIYADH: Contemporary Saudi artist Kawthar Al-Atiyah uses painting, sculpture and immersive material experimentation to create her deeply personal works. And those works focus on one recurring question: What does emotion look like when it becomes physical?
“My practice begins with the body as a site of memory — its weight, its tension, its quiet shifts,” Al-Atiyah tells Arab News. “Emotion is never abstract to me. It lives in texture, in light, in the way material breathes.”
This philosophy shapes the immersive surfaces she creates, which often seem suspended between presence and absence. “There is a moment when the body stops being flesh and becomes presence, something felt rather than seen,” she says. “I try to capture that threshold.”
Al-Atiyah, a graduate of Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, has steadily built an international profile for herself. Her participation in VOLTA Art Fair at Art Basel in Switzerland, MENART Fair in Paris, and exhibitions in the Gulf and Europe have positioned her as a leading Saudi voice in contemporary art.
Showing abroad has shaped her understanding of how audiences engage with vulnerability. “Across countries and cultures, viewers reacted to my work in ways that revealed their own memories,” she says. “It affirmed my belief that the primary language of human beings is emotion. My paintings speak first to the body, then to the mind.”
Al-Atiyah says her creative process begins long before paint touches canvas. Instead of sketching, she constructs physical environments made of materials including camel bone, raw cotton, transparent fabrics, and fragments of carpet.
“When a concept arrives, I build it in real space,” she says. “I sculpt atmosphere, objects, light and emotion before I sculpt paint.
“I layer color the way the body stores experience,” she continues. “Some layers stay buried, others resurface unexpectedly. I stop only when the internal rhythm feels resolved.”
This sensitivity to the unseen has drawn attention from international institutions. Forbes Middle East included her among the 100 Most Influential Women in the Arab World in 2024 and selected several of her pieces for exhibition.
“One of the works was privately owned, yet they insisted on showing it,” she says. “For me, that was a strong sign of trust and recognition. It affirmed my responsibility to represent Saudi culture with honesty and depth.”
Her recent year-long exhibition at Ithra deepened her understanding of how regional audiences interpret her work.
“In the Gulf, people respond strongly to embodied memory,” she says. “They see themselves in the quiet tensions of the piece, perhaps because we share similar cultural rhythms.”
A documentary is now in production exploring her process, offering viewers a rare look into the preparatory world that precedes each canvas.
“People usually see the final work. But the emotional architecture built before the painting is where the story truly begins,” she explains.
Beyond her own practice, Al-Atiyah is committed to art education through her work with Misk Art Institute. “Teaching is a dialogue,” she says. “I do not focus on technique alone. I teach students to develop intuition, to trust their senses, to translate internal experiences into honest visual language.”
She believes that artists should be emotionally aware as well as technically skilled. “I want them to connect deeply with themselves so that what they create resonates beyond personal expression and becomes part of a cultural conversation,” she explains.
In Saudi Arabia’s rapidly growing art scene, Al-Atiyah sees her role as both storyteller and facilitator.
“Art is not decoration, it is a language,” she says. “If my work helps someone remember something they have forgotten or feel something they have buried, then I have done what I set out to do.”
