Ever since Bob Dylan told a TIME Magazine journalist “I’m just as good a singer as Caruso” in 1965, fans have known to expect the unexpected with his interviews. He doesn’t give them too often these days, and current documentaries about past work are intentionally riddled with fabrications. His last Q&A was in March 2017, published on his own website, in promotion of his latest album, a triple-CD set of Great American Songbook standards (his third such album in a row), that ignored the fact that he’d just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but had yet to go to Sweden to pick it up. (He did so a few weeks later at a private ceremony.)
But Dylan’s new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, which features the already-released 17-minute ballad about the JFK assassination, is his first collection of original work in eight years, and it saw the Minnesota-born 79-year-old speaking with The New York Times. His ability to remain mercurial remains a constant.
The Times’ Douglas Brinkley sat with Dylan two years ago in upstate New York, and again more recently. In fact, the follow-up was the day after George Floyd’s killing. The singer-songwriter who recorded anti-racist anthems “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” in 1964 and “Hurricane” in 1975 sounded “depressed” according to the article and said “it sickened me no end to see George tortured to death like that,” and “it was beyond ugly. Let’s hope that justice comes swift for the Floyd family and for the nation.”
Dylan, while a visionary, has always seemed a little out of time, but seems resigned to the past being swiftly forgotten. “When you see somebody that is 10 years old, he’s going to be in control in 20 or 30 years, and he won’t have a clue about the world we knew,” he said, adding “telecommunications and advanced technology is the world they were born into. Our world is already obsolete.”
When asked about the recent deaths of Little Richard and John Prine, he had kinds words for both, saying Little Richard “lit a match under me. Tuned me into things I never would have known on my own.” He also suggested the late singer’s gospel albums were overlooked because gospel is the music of “good news” and “good news in today’s world is like a fugitive, treated like a hoodlum and put on the run. Castigated. All we see is good-for-nothing news.”