Murder Most Foul, new epic song by Bob Dyaln

Along with a new single released on 27th March, Murder Most Foul, Dylan released the following message: “Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty across the years. This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant and may God be with you.” Bob Dylan is no stranger to longer epics. Time Out of Mind had a track “Highlands” that lasted over 16 minutes. And his album Tempest had the title track that clocked in at almost fourteen minutes. Murder Most Foul is mesmerizing. The music is hushed. It’s a piano being quietly played over very muted percussion. Doug Herron’s violin plays along as a beautiful accent. There’s no jam or big guitar solo that tears up 10 minutes like CCR playing “Heard It Through the Grapevine.” The focus is all on Dylan’s voice – which sounds much less gravelly here than he’s sounded on his latter day albums. He’s singing in a less fierce, more melancholy way so maybe that’s why it isn’t so scratchy. He’s not whispering but it’s like a secret being murmured. The music is almost ethereal. There’s an almost spiritual or holy vibe. The focus on Dylan’s vocals are key because the lyrics of this song are mind blowing. The theme, on the surface at least, is the assassination of JFK in November of ’63. Leave it to Bob Dylan to write a song about one of the darkest chapters of America’s history during the current dark period of America’s history. It's poetry set to music. It feels like ‘The Iliad’, being the title “Murder Most Foul” probably from Shakespeare. One thread is a surreal, fever-dream imagining of JFK’s thoughts/conversation after he’s shot. But the lyrics seem to point to a bigger story than just JFK’s assassination. When he sings “The day they killed him someone said to me, “The Age of the Antichrist has just only begun,” we get the feeling there’s more to this song. It plays more like a travelogue through the last fifty years of culture. It’s more a commentary of how things were never quite right in America after JFK was killed. “For the last fifty years they’ve been searchin’ for that, Freedom, oh freedom, freedom over me, I hate to tell you, mister, but only dead men are free.” You could almost suggest that Dylan is painting a picture here that JFK wasn’t the only one who died on that grim November day in Dallas. As Dylan sings, in what seems to be a stream-of-consciousness way, he makes so many cultural references. This one is a stone-cold classic. It’s wonderful when rock and roll transcends the format and becomes art. Dylan’s music has always had the power to move us. This song is no exception. The song closes by inscribing itself into the corpus of American song through which American history is both forged and preserved: Play “Love Me or Leave Me,” by the great Bud Powell, play “The Blood-Stained Banner,” play “Murder Most Foul.” Source: bourbonandvinyl.net