'I Contain Multitudes': Bob Dylan releases second song in three weeks

In the song, Dylan compares himself to Anne Frank, Indiana Jones and the Rolling Stones

Bob Dylan has just released a second song in three weeks.  AFP 

Bob Dylan may have made his fans wait eight years for the March release of the song A Murder Most Foul, but they didn't have to wait long for the follow-up.

Called I Contain Multitudes, and just like its predecessor, the new song arrived without press release or hype, and no information about when it was recorded or with whom, or if it is part of a new album.

Although less epic than the 17-minute A Murder Most Foul, this new 4.38 minute song – like all of Dylan's best work – is filled with vivid imagery conjured from brutally sparse phrasing, and takes its title from a line in Walt Whitman's poem, Song of Myself.

Quietly delivered – Dylan’s voice is well-worn these days –  he breathes lines such as: “Today, tomorrow and yesterday too / The flowers are dying / Like all things do."

With typical Dylan gravel, and toying with imagery, he continues, “I fuss with my hair / And I fight blood feuds / I contain multitudes.”

Over slow tempo instrumentals, he goes on “I got a tell-tale heart like Mr Poe / Got skeletons in the walls of people you know,” before comparing himself to Holocaust victim Anne Frank, and the film character of Indiana Jones. "I'm just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones / And them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones / I go right to the edge, I go right to the end / I go right where all things lost are made good again."

Seemingly content to live on the periphery, Dylan knows exactly how to keep his audience confounded by constantly shifting what we think we know of him. Be it switching from acoustic to electric guitar and horrifying his folk music followers back in 1965 (a move that can still ignite arguments) or writing his own autobiography and scooping the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, Dylan is the master of the enigmatic.

A natural wordsmith, Dylan delivers spartan, eclectic phrasing, loaded with meaning. "What more can I tell you?" he sings, "I sleep with life and death in the same bed."

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