I don’t at all agree with Rosenbaum’s assessment of Dylan’s recent work, but I think I can see where he’s coming from. It’s true that Chronicles is more like his best earlier music in that it reinvents the genre it employs. Dylan’s post-97 music doesn’t do that, though its relation to the traditions it draws on is not easy to characterize. The music itself both does and doesn’t sound familiar, sort of the way classical music often does and doesn’t sound like the folk and popular tunes and rhythms it draws on–though obviously Dylan reworks his musical materials in different ways that classical music does. And the lyrics–the poetry of the songs–well, despite the wealth of thievings & borrowings that make up individual lines & phrases, I’m not sure how you characterize the compositional traditions behind them. As somebody else said–I think it was Robert Polito–who else writes songs like these? I don’t have an answer to that. And so maybe on this level Dylan’s recent work is still reinventing its genre–but if it is, it sure doesn’t strike me that way as I listen to it. Its unprecedentedness–if indeed it possesses that quality–disguises itself.

YOUR writing flows, beads and rivulets like thin wild mercury.

Bob