By Tania Phillips
There are some musicians that transcend generations, that intrinsically become part of culture – whether you listen to them or not.
Bob Dylan is one of those musicians with a name that is instantly recognizable, that could be justifiably labelled legend.
Yet he is also someone not to content to just rest on his laurels even if, in this case, they include a Nobel Prize for Literature.
So, a new album by the man most people know just simply as Dylan is a big deal. The fact that it is first album of new tracks in eight years makes the 10-track Rough and Rowdy Ways, released around the world late last week, more of a musical event than an album.
It is the first Dylan album since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2016 by the Swedish Academy “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
And if you think that Dylan might be an anachronistic dinosaur no longer relevant in today’s music industry – his almost six-decade career has been continuing unabated in the past two decades.
He has released seven studio albums within the past 23-years; a creative span that also included the recording of an Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning composition, ‘Things Have Changed’, from the film Wonder Boys, in 2001; a worldwide best-selling memoir, Chronicles Vol. 1, which spent 19 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List, in 2004 and was recently named the greatest rock memoir of all time by Rolling Stone.
He is the recipient of the Officier de la Legion d’honneur in 2013, Sweden’s Polar Music Award in 2000, a Doctorate from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and numerous other honors.
In his career Bob Dylan has sold more than 125 million records around the world.
ROUGH AND ROWDY WAYS is the artist’s 39th studio album and is available now on Columbia Records through Sony Music Entertainment Australia.
