Bob Dylan Drops Another Midnight Special: The New Song "I Contain Multitudes"

Sleeplessness is a way of life, alas, these days. With so much gone wrong in a world in the grip of a pandemic virus, with an increasing number of people out of work and dipping into savings to pay bills, with political and professional and personal uncertainties, it’s hard to lie down and shut your eyes after dark. Recently, there has been a merciful bonus to being awake at midnight, if you like music — and Bob Dylan’s music in particular.

At midnight on March 26, Eastern Standard Time, the website bobdylan.com briefly went dark. It soon showed the announcement of, and a link to, a new Dylan song, “Murder Most Foul.” In a couple of weeks the seventeen-minute song — lyrics here — has garnered over three million views at BobDylanVEVO.

On April 16, at 6:25pm, Dylan’s official Twitter stated the hashtag #IContainMultitudes. The phrase comes from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself number 51. Dylan quoted this line of Whitman’s, while discussing Allen Ginsberg, in footage recently released as part of The Rolling Thunder Re-vue: A Bob Dylan Movie by Martin Scorsese (2019). Ginsberg, it should be noted, was a true disciple of Whitman, making this clear in his poetry and in public lectures all his life. It’s generally taken as a positive phrase, a compliment; but careful — if read in context, it’s darker. The line celebrates the speaker’s self-contradictions, something for which Dylan has been both damned and praised throughout his career, but the section concludes: “Will you speak before I am gone? will you already prove too late?”

Intrigued, of course, I decided to wait up for more. Say what else one will of him, Dylan doesn’t disappoint. When his social media mavens place a clue like this one, midnight seemed the right guess again. That he seems to like performing “Soon After Midnight,” the grim barroom ballad from Tempest (2012), his last album to date of original compositions, didn’t hurt the guessing.

photograph of Bob Dylan, July 1996 Salzburg Austria, by Andrea Orlandi

At 12:06, “I Contain Multitudes” appeared on YouTube at BobDylanVEVO. Here it is.

Thank you, Bob.

I Contain Multitudes

by Bob Dylan ©2020

*my unofficial pass at the lyrics

Today and tomorrow, and yesterday too

The flowers are dyin’ like all things do

Follow me close, I’m goin’ to Ballinalee

I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me

I fuss with my hair, and I fight blood feuds

I contain multitudes.

Got a tell-tale heart, like Mr. Poe

Got skeletons in the walls of people you know

I’ll drink to the truth and the things we said

I’ll drink to the man that shares your bed

I paint landscapes, and I paint nudes

I contain multitudes.

Red Cadillac and a black mustache

Rings on my fingers that sparkle and flash

Tell me what’s next, what shall we do?

Half my soul baby belongs to you

I rollick and I frolic with all the young dudes

I contain multitudes.

I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones

And them British bad boys the Rolling Stones

I go right to the edge I go right to the end

I go right where all things lost are made good again

I sing the songs of experience, like William Blake.

I’ve no apologies to make

Everything’s flowing all at the same time

I live on a boulevard of crime

I drive fast cars and I eat fast foods

I contain multitudes.

Pink pedal-pushers, red blue jeans

All the pretty maids and all the old queens

All the old queens from all my past lives

I carry four pistols and two large knives

I’m a man of contradictions

I’m a man of many moods

I contain multitudes.

You greedy old wolf I’ll show you my heart

But not all of it, only the hateful part

I’ll sell you down the river, I’ll put a price on your head.

What more can I tell ya? I sleep with life and death in the same bed

Get lost madam get up off my knee

Keep your mouth away from me

I’ll keep the path open, the path in my mind

I’ll see to it that there’s no love left behind

I play Beethoven’s sonatas, Chopin’s preludes

I contain multitudes.