Is Bob Dylan dropping a new album tonight?
Is a new Bob Dylan album on the way?
Stranger things have happened. On Thursday afternoon, the bard’s Twitter account posted a scary illustration of a top-hatted skeleton with a needle in his hand. Suggesting a character from a pulp novel from the ’50s, the skeleton’s shadow is corpse-dangling from a rope. A would-be album title, “False Prophet,” sits atop the image. The tweet also carried a cryptic message: “What are you lookin’ at — there’s nothing to see.”
The suggestion that Dylan’s new studio album is on its way is backed by the recent surprise releases of two new songs. The first, a 17-minute song called “Murder Most Foul,” is a Shakespeare reference from “Hamlet.” Specifically, as The Times’ Randy Lewis noted, Act 1, Scene 5, which is voiced by a ghost: “Murder most foul, as in the best it is. But this most foul, strange and unnatural.”
The second, a melancholy ballad called “I Contain Multitudes,” features Dylan sighing into the microphone like an exhausted reaper. “I got a tell-tale heart like Mr. Poe / Got skeletons in the walls of people you know,” he sings. “I drink to the truth / And the things we said / I’ll drink to the man who shares your bed.” He name-checks Anne Frank and couples “Indiana Jones” with “the Rolling Stones.”
Bob Dylan, I Contain Multitudes
If true, “False Prophet” would be Dylan’s 39th studio album and the first of new material since 2012’s “Tempest.” In the interim, the artist has issued a trio of covers albums, “Shadows in the Night,” “Fallen Angels” and “Triplicate.”
New albums and songs are typically released via streaming services on Thursdays at 9 p.m. Pacific time.
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