Bob Dylan will release his first album of original songs in eight years, Rough and Rowdy Ways, on June 19th. Early Friday morning, Dylan dropped a third song from the album, the swaggering, guitar-heavy “False Prophet,” which follows “Murder Most Foul” and “I Contain Multitudes.” “I ain’t no false prophet,” Dylan growls over a slinky striptease-blues groove, powered by a downright filthy fuzz-guitar riff. “I just know what I know.”
The song’s lyrics veer between existential weariness, Willie Dixon-worthy boasts, unabashed come-ons (at one point addressing two women – “Mary Lou” and “Miss Pearl” – at once) and more spiritual allusions. He nods to a Zen koan with a line about “climbing a mountain of swords with my bare feet,” quotes Martin Luther’s phrase “enemy of strife,” tells a “poor devil” to look up at a “city of God,” and ends the song by casually singing “I can’t remember when I was born/ and I forgot when I died,” followed by a fusillade of lead guitar.
Read more at: Rolling Stone, click here.