“I ain’t no false prophet/I just said what I said” Bob Dylan sings on his new album Rough and Rowdy Ways. (61)

When the singer and songwriter Bob Dylan issues his 39th studio album “Rough and Rowdy Ways” tonight, he’ll build on a career dense with memorable verbiage. (57)

On his first album of original material in eight years, Bob Dylan sings of betrayal, dismemberment and rock ‘n’ roll. (52)

Unlike “Like a Rolling Stone” and any number of rhyme-less classic works in the Dylan canon, the 10 new songs on “Rough and Rowdy Ways” rely heavily on metered verse and ear-pleasing connections. (51)

Pushing 80, Dylan weaves much candlelit gloom through “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” as if he’s staring at the reaper himself. (48)

The shaking strings and tentative keys are a pretty landscape for the narration on 'Murder Most Foul' and indeed, the music on Rough and Rowdy ways is some of Dylan’s strongest compositions in a decade. (44)

March's release of ‘Murder Most Foul’ - a lament about the assassination of JFK - was Dylan's first original material in eight years. (42)

Whether coupling “flowers on your tomb” with “curtains in your room” in “Idiot Wind,” “Botticelli’s niece” and “masterpiece” (“When I Paint My Masterpiece”) or “murmur of a prayer” and “it’s getting there” in “Not Dark Yet,” Dylan’s Nobel-winning way with the English language has connected his 58 years worth of studio recordings. (40)

“Of course we do, we know who you are/then they blew off his head while he was still in the car” Dylan sings with the hard ’T’s of a child hoping their teacher notices the rhyme they have made. (40)

For the rest of us, Rough and Rowdy Ways is merely a pretty album from a member of a nostalgic generation. (39)

When the singer and songwriter Bob Dylan issues his 39th studio album “Rough and Rowdy Ways” tonight, he’ll build on a career dense with memorable verbiage.

Long regarded as a master of both free and rhymed verse, his lifetime’s work is so impressive that most Americans have been told this at least once a month since birth, don’t need to hear it again and are already reading past this introduction.

Whether coupling “flowers on your tomb” with “curtains in your room” in “Idiot Wind,” “Botticelli’s niece” and “masterpiece” (“When I Paint My Masterpiece”) or “murmur of a prayer” and “it’s getting there” in “Not Dark Yet,” Dylan’s Nobel-winning way with the English language has connected his 58 years worth of studio recordings.

Unlike “Like a Rolling Stone” and any number of rhyme-less classic works in the Dylan canon, the 10 new songs on “Rough and Rowdy Ways” rely heavily on metered verse and ear-pleasing connections.

On his first album of original material in eight years, Bob Dylan sings of betrayal, dismemberment and rock ‘n’ roll.

Within his lyrics, Dylan name-checks Julius Caesar, East L.A., Wolf Man Jack, Harry Truman, Patsy Cline, Indiana Jones, St.

Peter, Karl Marx, Don Henley, Frédéric Chopin, Leon Russell, John F.

Kennedy, Calliope, Cadillacs, Georgy Zhukov, Sigmund Freud, Glenn Frey, Elvis Presley, Ludwig van Beethoven, Deep Ellum, the Holy Grail, “Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando,” Trojan women, Carl Wilson, Scarlett O’Hara, Gower Avenue and the Acid Queen, among others.

1.

I sleep with life and death in the same bed.

2.

Beatles or Stones? Dylan’s previous studio album of new material, “Tempest,” closed with “Roll On, John,” about John Lennon.

I go right where all things lost are made good again.

3.

Put them six feet under and pray for their souls.

4.

Despite the sheer volume of proper names that populate “My Rough and Rowdy Ways,” the songwriter doesn’t mention anyone in the current U.S. administration.

The city of God is there on the hill.

5.

Across the album, Dylan delivers his lyrics with a notable melodicism.

I’ll be in Black Horse Tavern on Armageddon Street.

Phoebe Bridgers is a singer-songwriter for the ages.

Phoebe Bridgers is a singer-songwriter for the ages.

6.

I made up my mind to give myself to you.

7.

I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.

8.

I’ll take a sword and hack off your arm.

9.

Better seal up your lips if you want to stay in the game.

10.

11.

The record’s loveliest song, “Mother of Muses” is a precisely rendered ode to the creative life.

Put me upright, make me walk straight.

12.

Make me invisible like the wind.

Pushing 80, Dylan weaves much candlelit gloom through “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” as if he’s staring at the reaper himself.

I turned the key and broke it off and I crossed the Rubicon.

I pray to the cross, I kiss the girls and I cross the rubicon.

There aren’t enough songs about southern Florida.

Down on the bottom, way down in Key West.

On the album’s 17-minute closing song, “Murder Most Foul,” Dylan focuses on John F.

Kennedy’s assassination and its aftermath.

There’s a party going on behind the grassy knoll.

The last couplets on “Murder Most Foul” are a playful set of rhymed requests.

“I ain’t no false prophet/I just said what I said” Bob Dylan sings on his new album Rough and Rowdy Ways.

It’s a line that describes its composer well, though it was written to describe someone else.

Bob Dylan is not a false prophet.

Not any sort or prophet, in fact.

If you’re a Bob Dylan diehard you’re about to receive a real lockdown treat: this is a record replete with tenderness and beauty.

For the rest of us, Rough and Rowdy Ways is merely a pretty album from a member of a nostalgic generation.

An album of 'I said what I saids’ from a man whose predictions no longer hold any sway.

March's release of ‘Murder Most Foul’ - a lament about the assassination of JFK - was Dylan's first original material in eight years.

Swiftly followed by ‘I Contain Multitudes’ then ‘False Prophet’, all three were gentle percussion-light folk tunes laced with metaphor and simile.

They fizzled with the vital rawness of Dylan’s familiar throaty narration.

Lyrics also followed a tried Dylan formula: tireless streams of couplets with hard rhymes that decree the decay of our world.

For many, it was a surprise and welcome return.

As a trio, and later as part of a longer album, that magic falls away.

Bound together, Dylan's gloomy lyrics morph from observation into dogma on the back of similarly antiquated musical styles.

For the generations of young people doing their best to stay positive in a world they will inherit, it’s just another gloomy worldview from an old artist with few fresh ideas.

“Of course we do, we know who you are/then they blew off his head while he was still in the car” Dylan sings with the hard ’T’s of a child hoping their teacher notices the rhyme they have made.

The shaking strings and tentative keys are a pretty landscape for the narration on 'Murder Most Foul' and indeed, the music on Rough and Rowdy ways is some of Dylan’s strongest compositions in a decade.

But alongside a stream of quasi-poetic one-liners, it acts more of a piece of nostalgic navel-gazing than a relevant twist on an old pedigree.

The sixteen-minute ‘Murder Most Foul’ is a counterweight to a 52-minute A-side that weighs heavy with gloom.

“Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?” Dylan asks rhetorically on the bluesy ‘My Own Version of You’.

'Go back to the gutter, try your luck..." he growls on 'Crossing the Rubicon'.

On 'Black Rider'he goes full doomsday, forseeing and tempting an inevitable end.

It's a defeatist attitude that constitutes an old way, an old way that's also evident in the soundscapes Dylan explores in CD number one:‘False Prophet’ deals in early rock ’n’ roll while ‘My Own Version of You’ pays tribute to RnB (heavy on the B) and ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You’ is woozy with doo-wop.

All of these genres are exceptional disciplines for which we can thank for most of our modern music.

But there are endless historic examples to revisit, many of them performed impeccably by the Black artists who pioneered them.

The problem here is that Dylan does and says nothing new with his compositional talent.

With its staunch nostalgia and morbid flush, Rough and Rowdy Ways sounds in many ways like an artist’s swan song.

In a rare and recent interview with the New York Times, Dylan admits to the increasingly moth-eaten views of his generation, proving so a sentence later by insisting that technological vulnerabilities are no concern of the young: “they could care less” he says.

In fact, anxieties around the growth of technology (and apocalyptic fears) are not the property of the old.

Studies show that it is the youth who tend to be more cautious about the information they put online.

And if I may speak for the young in saying: we don’t need any more scaremongering from elders whose generation are responsible for the problems we have inherited.

Bob Dylan's place among the Greats is not a fact for debating.

When you lift an old Dylan record down from the loft or fish it out from the record shelf, it’s a joy to wipe the dust from its cover and balance it under the player's needle.

The problem is that with Rough and Rowdy Ways, the dust comes caked in.

This is certainly an album that could hold its own next to some of Dylan’s best.

But Dylan’s best are more than forty years behind him.