Oh No! Not Another Bob Dylan Book. This is the title of a 1991 publication from Patrick Humphries and John Bauldie. Nearly 35 years has elapsed since then, so goodness knows how many more books have been written about the man for whom the term cultural icon is surely not that much of a stretch.
The American literary journalist, literary critic, and novelist Ron Rosenbaum is acutely aware of the preponderance of books on Bob Dylan. As such, he subtitles his new book Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed with the words A Kind of Biography, highlighting the fact that it will buck the hitherto familiar biographical trend. Rosenbaum focuses instead on Dylan’s songs and songwriting – particularly his later work (post his born-again Christian phase in the late ‘70s) – what he describes as Dylan’s theodicy (the vindication of God in view of the existence of evil), and the question of sincerity versus authenticity.
It is a mighty premise and one for which Rosenbaum uses his mammoth interview with Bob Dylan in 1977 – conducted over a 10-day period on the film set of Renaldo & Clara – as the platform from which to launch his many literary observations. He zig-zags, back and forth, across Dylan’s life from his childhood in Hibbing, Minnesota to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.
Along this meandering and occasionally repetitive journey, Rosenbaum draws upon many and varied literary and cultural reference points. He travels from William Shakespeare to J.D. Salinger and the Roman poet Catallus to Leonard Cohen, routinely returning to the theme of Dylan having “lost his cultural capital in his Jesus-freak period” (in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s), something which prompted Rosenbaum to distance himself from Dylan’s music for years.
But Rosenbaum did come back to Bob Dylan’s work and in the third last chapter of this book he highlights 11 songs that capture the “elusive, seductive magic” of some of his later songwriting, albeit one of these songs – ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’ – is an anomaly in that it was written more than a decade before Dylan’s “Jesus period” but is one that he “never performed live or recorded in more than 40 years.”
It is difficult to argue against many, if not most of Ron Rosenbaum’s song choices, though, personally, I would have found space for ‘Not Dark Yet’ or ‘Standing in the Doorway’ – from 1997’s Time Out of Mind album – as further examples of what Rosenbaum describes as Dylan’s “genius that could not be extinguished.”
Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed is a meticulously researched, most learned of books where Ron Rosenbaum explores the language, words, and phrases that Bob Dylan has used in his lyrics. Rosenbaum posits a number of theories as to their meaning and the impact Dylan has had upon our culture and consciousness, yet for all their fascination you are left with the ineffable feeling as Rosenbaum rightly says himself, “with Dylan you can never be sure you know what you know.”
Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed by Ron Rosenbaum will be published on 23rd October 2025 by Melville House.
