Bob Dylan Releases a New Single: ‘I Contain Multitudes’

For this unexpectedly rapid-fire follow-up to his last song where he borrowed from Shakespeare, he’s cribbing from Walt Whitman. 

“I Contain Multitudes” takes its name from a famous parenthetical thought in Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” And true to the declaration of personal complexity, the tune itself contains a legion’s worth of thoughts and attitudes at a mere four and a half minutes long.

The two songs together represent quite a break in the drought of new material from Dylan, who hadn’t released a previously unheard song since 2012’s “Tempest” until he put out “Murder Most Foul” in a sneak attack at midnight March 27. 

Just three weeks later, he has released another song, with “I Contain Multitudes” also getting a midnight ET/9 PT surprise release with no advance warning.

Although it’s only a fourth as long as “Murder,” “Multitudes” does share some similarities with the song, including a drumless, rolling sound in which a meagre number of players, including a steel guitarist, seem to be gently improvising on a theme as they go along.

It also shares a gift for bizarre juxtapositions of cultural references. The most likely-to-be-quoted lyrics:

I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones

And them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones

But the song isn’t so much of a triptych of Dylan’s record collection this time around, although there’s still a lot of cataloguing going on. It’s more like he’s thumbing through his many moods. 

At one point, he sounds like the defeated, lovelorn figure of so much of his 23-year-old “Time Out of Mind” album:

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

I’ll drink to the man that shares your bed

And he adds, “Half my soul, baby, belongs to you.” But later, he’s dismissive, even contemptuous, of a woman.

Get lost, madame, get up off my knee

Keep your mouth away from me

As with so many Dylan songs, individual couplets make perfect sense, they seem to be contradicted by something that follows. But maybe more than in any previous song, the rationale for that intra-song shape-shifting is summed up in the title itself. 

“What more can I tell you? I sleep with life and death in the same bed,” Dylan sings, sending all the fans who were up late enough to get an unexpected treat off to their rest.

Dylan didn’t release any statement with this song, as he did with the March one, and whether the rumoured new album is really on the way remains as much of a mystery as ever. 

Now, there’s reason to suspect that the man who sounded the alarm on changing times five and a half decades ago may have embraced change so much that he’s joined some of the kids in adopting a singles model.