Bob Dylan has released another new song without any previous announcement. You can listen to “I Contain Multitudes” below.

It follows the unveiling of “Murder Most Foul” three weeks ago, a 17-minute piece that gave him his first-ever No.1 chart placing (on top of the Rock Digital Song Sales).

While “Murder Most Foul” explored the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the new song seems to be a more lighthearted and playful affair, as Dylan compares his personalities to those of the Rolling Stones, Walt Whitman, Indiana Jones, Edgar Allan Poe and David Bowie – even using the lyric “all the young dudes” at one point.

He hasn’t revealed if the release of new songs comes ahead of an album of all-new material, though speculating is increasing that the plan is to reveal a follow-up to 2012’s Tempest in the near future.

In a 2017 interview on his website, Dylan reflected on the placing of songs in the modern world. “There’s a lot of great singers who write weak songs and a lot of great songwriters who don’t sing," he said. "Trouble for them is they don’t have the outlets we used to have – nowhere to place these songs, no movies, no radio shows, TV variety shows, recording sessions, programs that were always calling for songs. So they have to sing them themselves.”

He added that "songwriters have to have a reason to write songs. … There has to be some purpose to performing it too. And sometimes it doesn’t connect. There is no magic formula to make that happen. … If you can write your own songs, that’s ideal, but nobody will fault you if you don’t. Barbra Streisand and Tom Jones don’t.”

 

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