Bob Dylan adopts various guises in surprise track I Contain Multitudes
Warmly burnished and gently cryptic, this is easy listening at its most enjoyable
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
The Financial Times
24 April 2020
Following the surprise release of “Murder Most Foul” last month, Bob Dylan has another new song up his sleeve. Like its Macbeth-inspired predecessor, “I Contain Multitudes” borrows its title from the literary canon, a phrase from Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself, 51”.
Musically, it doesn’t contain multitudes. A thoughtfully strummed acoustic guitar and swaying bent notes from a steel guitar predominate, with a cello adding an elegiac tone in the background. It has an easy lilt, the slow sway of Hawaiian palms in a warm westerly breeze. There’s an odd moment when the volume seems to fade out momentarily before fading in again: possibly the result of overhasty editing.
Dylan sings with a soft rise and fall, never straining himself, but full of verbal vim. The sing-speak style and lack of song structure resemble “Murder Most Foul”. But “I Contain Multitudes” is lighter and shorter than its 17-minute predecessor. It is a very Dylanish form of easy listening: warmly burnished, gently cryptic, infused with a mercurial sense of feeling.
“I’m a man of contradictions,” he announces, paraphrasing Whitman’s poem. The primary contradiction of life — death — occurs at the top of the song (“The flowers are dying like all things do”). Then Dylan adopts a contradictory series of personae: a Blakean visionary poet, Little Red Riding Hood, a Rolling Stones-style bad boy of rock ’n’ roll, Anne Frank (murdered by the Nazis) and Indiana Jones (defeater of the Nazis).
Wit is the life force holding death at bay here. It’s most evident in the various rhymes that Dylan has evidently enjoyed devising for “multitudes” — “blood feuds”, “all the young dudes”, “Chopin’s preludes”: bravo.
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