Bob Dylan Now: Hitting The Road Again, At 80 | BU Today

This is the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour…

Yudkin: I’m excited about the fact that he’s doing his latest album—and that, he never used to do. There’s always this backlist of hits that he used to do. The challenge for him, and it’s an understandable challenge, is that he wants to make it different for himself. He couldn’t possibly survive if he sang the same songs the same way a thousand times. So he’s trying to keep himself musically alive. But it’s often at the cost of our own understanding and appreciation of the performance. Right now, since he’s doing Rough and Rowdy Ways, and it’s a new album, I’m hopeful that he will sing them fairly straight and not muck around with them.

Where does Rough and Rowdy Ways rank among his albums, including his great work of the 1960s?

Yudkin: Surprisingly high on the list. I have not fallen for Dylan’s recent American Songbook, Frank Sinatra stuff. I like those songs, and I like to hear them sung by other people. So I’ve been disappointed. But every so often there is an absolute gem that comes out of Dylan. Time Out of Mind (1997) I think is a masterpiece. And Rough and Rowdy Ways, in its curious, somewhat self-reflective way, is also a great album. It’s quite remarkable that somebody whose career goes back to 1962 can come up with great music like that.

Barents: I would put a few of his albums from the last 30 years up there with the best of the electric trilogy of the 1960s or even Blood on the Tracks, which is my favorite. Some of the songs—“Love Sick,” “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” “Tempest”—are just great and things that he probably couldn’t have done earlier. The production is spot-on, the music is amazing and perfect for the songs. He’s got a crack band and knows how to use them in the studio. He’s more mature as a songwriter than he was back in the ’60s, and an album like this one is more perfect than some of his more acclaimed earlier albums.

What about that band, anchored since 1989 by bassist Tony Garnier?

Yudkin: The thing about Dylan nowadays is that he can command the greatest musicians available. They have this uncanny ability to play along so that it enhances the song, it doesn’t get in the way of the song. The backup is perfect, the fills are brilliant. So when you hear him on tour, part of the joy is hearing those fabulous backing musicians

For many people who don’t like him, it’s because of his voice, which has gotten even more, um, distinctive over the years.

Yudkin: Let me put it into context. Very frequently in the ’60s, people said, ‘I love his songs, but I can’t stand his singing.’ I have always thought that was a misunderstanding of what great singing is. Great singing is not the quality of the voice, it’s the use of the voice that you have. The placement of the pitches, the threading of the line of the melody, the draping of the rhythm across the beat. You know, Billie Holiday didn’t have a great voice, in the sense of a great-sounding voice, and Dylan doesn’t either, but he’s a wonderful, wonderful singer. And even since he started becoming really raspy, around Time Out of Mind, he’s still a great singer. Because it’s not about the sound production, it’s about the use of the instrument he has, and that’s his instrument now. That’s the way life goes, you get raspy as you get older.

Barents: The fact that he does Sinatra and the American Songbook now, at this age, with that voice, and fairly convincingly, I think is testament to his great singing, his great phrasing.