Artists on Murder Most Foul

David Byrne, Fiona Apple, Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, Jason Isbell, Ron Sexsmith and more

David Byrne

“Murder Most Foul” starts off like one of these songs, but without the driving propulsive rhythm. It seems at first to be a conspiratorial exegesis on the Kennedy assassination… with a lot of low life humor tossed in.

“Being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb
He said, ‘Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am?’
‘Of course we do, we know who you are’
Then they blew off his head while he was still in the car.”

The rhyme scheme is simple, like a children’s song or a poem from Alice In Wonderland, which makes it even funnier. I laughed at “sacrificial lamb” and “know who I am?” Dylan of course is doing his well-established “Dylan” voice and character throughout — which helps him pull off the hilarious rhymes and references.

Then little by little the song begins to veer off and begins to become something else — a meditation on the times, using the assassination as a jumping off point. The verses become littered with quotes and references to Gone With The Wind, the Beatles, Gerry And The Pacemakers, Altamont, Woodstock — on and on. Not all of it makes sense, but the sheer amount of clever comedy and portentous humor keeps me smiling. Soon it goes from third person — the story of the assassination plot — to first person. “I’ve been led into some kind of trap,” “I hate to tell you mister only dead men are free,” “I’m just a patsy like Patsy Cline” — the songwriter, and by implication all of us, are also the victims of this fiendish plot.

We’re in Dylan’s head now — the songs he heard over the years make the world in there. “Only The Good Die Young,” “I’d Rather Go Blind,” Don Henley and Glenn Frey — they’re all rattling around in there. And the rest of the song, like one of those earlier list songs, is a long list of artists and songs he’s asking Wolfman Jack to play on the radio — songs that paint a picture of what’s in Bob’s head but also of the whole 20th century, evoked through its popular songs. The Old Weird America, in the phrase Greil Marcus coined. It’s a hilarious hodgepodge of a list — jazz, gospel, pop, soul, rock — it could go on forever, and it almost does. The goofiness of the rhymes keeps it from getting pretentious and tedious — it’s deep and dark, but there’s joy and jokiness here too.

The music is key. It ebbs and flows but never establishes a clear delineated groove. I suspect if it did it would gain some temporary energy but soon it would get repetitious and we’d lose interest.

So this song was inspiring to me — not as earth-shattering as “Mr. Tambourine Man” was to a wee lad, but important in a different way. I hear Dylan finding, at this stage in his career, a new way to approach these epic songs. He’s not done exploring yet. That’s inspiration for me for sure. Not that I want to do a song like this — he’s already done it — but the idea that around the bend I might find something new that I’ve never done before keeps me pushing on and hopeful.

Fiona Apple

So I’m sitting here with Zelda in February, really relaxed, and we’re about to have dinner, and I look down at my phone and see Blake Mills texting me. I hadn’t heard from Blake in months. And he’s like, “So I’m working on something, I can’t tell anybody about it, but we want you to come in and do something.” And I was like, “Um, I can’t I’m busy.” And he was like, “Can I call you?” So he called me and he goes, “OK, it’s Bob Dylan. Bob is asking if you will come here and record.” And I went: “When?” And he went: “Now.” And I said “FUCK” so loud that I could hear people on the other end of the phone laughing.

I was like, “I’m not trying to put myself down here, Blake, but you and I both know that I’m very underqualified for this job. There’s no point.” And he’s like, “He just wants you to come in to be you.” So I went in the next day. I’m only on “Murder Most Foul.”

I couldn’t believe it. I had met him many years ago, but I don’t really know why I’m on the record. I was there a total of like seven hours. I told Bob I was really insecure about it, and he was really encouraging and nice. He was just like, “You’re not here to be perfect, you’re here to be you.” To have Bob Dylan say that before my record came out was a huge deal for me. And I mean, this was like the one person I could have met who’s alive right now where it actually would have meant something to me as a kid.

Nick Cave

Many other people have also written in about Bob Dylan’s new song, ‘Murder Most Foul’ — and the interest is justifiable. It is a perplexing but beautiful song and, like many people, I have been extremely moved by it.

At the heart of this seventeen-minute epic is a terrible event, the assassination of JFK — a dark vortex that threatens to pull everything into it, just as it did in the USA back in 1963. Whirling around the incident Dylan weaves a litany of loved things — music mostly — that reach into the darkness, in deliverance. As the song unfolds he throws down lifeline after lifeline, insistent and mantra-like, and we are lifted, at least momentarily, free of the event. Dylan’s relentless cascade of song references points to our potential as human beings to create beautiful things, even in the face of our own capacity for malevolence. ‘Murder Most Foul’ reminds us that all is not lost, as the song itself becomes a lifeline thrown into our current predicament.

The instrumentation is formless and fluid and very beautiful. Lyrically it has all the perverse daring and playfulness of many of Dylan’s great songs, but beyond that there is something within his voice that feels extraordinarily comforting, especially at this moment. It is as though it has travelled a great distance, through stretches of time, full of an earned integrity and stature that soothes in the way of a lullaby, a chant, or a prayer.

As for whether this is the last time we will hear a new Bob Dylan song. I certainly hope not. But perhaps there is some wisdom in treating all songs, or for that matter, all experiences, with a certain care and reverence, as if encountering these things for the last time. I say this not just in the light of the novel coronavirus, rather that it is an eloquent way to lead one’s life and to appreciate the here and now, by savouring it as if it were for the last time. To have a drink with a friend as if it were the last time, to eat with your family as it were the last time, to read to your child as if it were the last time, or indeed, to sit in the kitchen listening to a new Bob Dylan song as if it were the last time. It permeates all that we do with greater meaning, placing us within the present, our uncertain future, temporarily arrested.

SCARLET RIVERA

I love it. I mean, I love it that if you really look at the lyrics, you can say, well, it was about an event that happened a long time ago in the ’60s. But if you really look carefully at the lyrics, it brings you up to date, because it’s talking about the age of the antichrist is coming. And other lyrics talk about the progression of history. The fact is that this one is even incredibly deep and profound and it’s way longer than any single should ever be and it still made it as a top of the charts is wonderful.

JASON ISBELL

Oh, I like it. I think it’s great. Can we call it a new Dylan song though? I think he’s been hanging onto it for a while. But he’s still very, very powerful. He can still cut to the heart of something and his mind is very, very sharp. We did a few shows with him a couple of years ago on a tour that Willie Nelson put together and Dylan was on a few of them. And it was really good because I kind of got the sense that because Willie was there Dylan felt like he should rise to the occasion. Because I know some nights he doesn’t really feel like being on stage… at least it doesn’t look like it some nights. But at these shows he was really in rare form and you know he was trying really hard and I thought that would be because Willie’s here. You know, Willie’s his elder and there aren’t that many songwriters left that Bob Dylan would consider to be an elder. But I felt really lucky to see those shows.

On the positive message of turning to music in time of crisis.

And also, it reminds you of early Dylan. A lot of songwriters, and I did this, start out talking about themselves. They’re confessional for the first half of their careers and then if you’re doing it right, your own personal problems get solved and you get comfortable and you start writing about things outside your door. And that’s usually where songwriters will slip up. They start getting vague and preachy and the music’s just not that great anymore. But Dylan did it in the other order. He started out writing about society and the world around him and then eventually honed into himself and started writing about his own life. And this new song makes me think of the early Dylan who was sort of angry and indicting on one hand but also hopeful that things would get better.

M WARD

I listened to it once and I loved the ambition of it. And I loved the courage in it. It would have been even more maybe incredible to be released a couple of decades ago. But it’s still so great to hear and I’m glad that he put it out. 

Yeah, it’s an interesting time to put that song out where people are…. struggling. My point of view lately is to try to put something out into the world that people can lean on right now. Instead of something to, um bring more abrasion into the world when there’s enough frustration right now in the newspaper. 

RON SEXSMITH 

Oh my God, 17 minutes! It was just kind of amazing really. I thought it was brilliant. I know he wrote it a few years ago but it just felt so kind of what we needed to hear in some ways. So, there’s a lot in there. It’s a lot to unpack and that’s alright.

I guess he did it for the Tempest album. But I just think when this whole COVID thing happened, I think a lot of artists were, “What can I put out there to help people get through it.” I think that I was his way of doing that.

I listened to it three or four times and it was just something else and it did feel kind of apocalyptic in a way. The feeling of when it all went wrong or something. They always say that, I guess, about the Kennedy assassination, the whole innocence lost and all that. But really when you dig deeper into that story it just feels there’s a lot of layers to it and a lot of darkness behind the scenes that we may never know the whole story. He seemed to be opening up that whole thing. But it just felt very timely. It felt like what we’re living through now in the age of Trump and all that too – it just feels kind of cyclical.

Devendra Banhart

“Murder Most Foul” is my current favorite Bob Dylan song…With “Not Dark Yet” and “He Was A Friend Of Mine” following close behind in an ever rotating “What part of Bob’s insanely brilliant career am I listening to at the moment” carousel…

This song from his THIRTY NINTH album!!! has a number of fascinating elements…

From its myriad of cultural and political reference points, its heartbreaking time traveling dream gospel prophetic lucidity, and its gentle matter of fact delivery…

But it’s the totally set in stone arrangement that somehow also has the feeling of being totally ethereal and structureless that really blows my mind…

It has the ability to stealthily float through the windows of your consciousness or completely ensnare your attention depending on where your focus is at that moment… This is not easy to do…

Released at the beginning of the pandemic, it feels like this whole year.

Andy Bell (Ride)

Scrolling through the Bob Dylan section of my iTunes library, I can find a contender for my favorite Dylan song on pretty much every album in my collection. But you’ve asked for one, and so I shall reluctantly oblige. In the midst of lockdown, in the loneliest, most angst ridden part of Spring 2020, I was awake in the middle of the night switching between doom scrolling and listening to pandemic related podcasts, when my feed was suddenly bathed in the light of excitement about this new Bob Dylan song, a really really long song about the JFK assassination. There was something very comforting about going back to immerse yourself in a good old fashioned OG conspiracy theory, not one of these newfangled right-wing Facebook-sponsored ones, and I totally escaped 2020 in the middle of the night for about an hour while I listened to the song and then googled every unknown reference in the lyrics. For that reason I’m nominating “Murder Most Foul” as my favorite. Bob’s still got it, and by the way, I’m looking forward to Chronicles volume 2!

Jarvis Cocker

My favorite Bob Dylan song is one of his most recent: “Murder Most Foul.”

I first heard it when it suddenly materialized on the internet on the 27th of March 2020. That was four days after the UK entered its first coronavirus lockdown. The timing is important, I think, because there was a real feeling of anxiety about the future and where the whole planet was heading. People began to overuse words like “surreal” and “unprecedented.” And then this song came, seemingly out of nowhere, about the day the USA got “un-Presidented”

It really felt like the right song at the right moment — a fevered summing-up of the pop culture of the Western world at the very instant that world appeared to be on the point of disappearing forever.

Dylan reveals himself as a fan as well as a creator in “Murder Most Foul”: Pop hits, Wolfman Jack, Stevie Nicks, the Birdman Of Alcatraz all drift through your consciousness as you listen. It’s a dream in song form. Or it’s like Kennedy’s brains splattered all over the page and somehow Dylan managed to scribble down their dying thoughts before they fizzled out.

It’s a complete work of genius.

Elvis Costello

Upon hearing the last six or so minutes of 'Murder Most Foul', in which Dylan unfolds a litany of singers and actors names, song and film titles, I found myself filled with tears but not out of despair but because those named are no more lost to us than hope itself. They weigh in the balance on the side of worth and even a little truth, against all of the viciousness that has taken place since the brutal events in November '63, described in the opening stanzas. This song is "about President Kennedy" in the same way that, Moby Dick is about a whale of a time. Make no mistake, this is a writer and - perhaps more importantly - a singer, operating at the top of their powers. Backed by an ensemble playing with the closest attention to the narrative line, the album is sung with incredible nuance that belies most estimations of what it takes to be a great singer and one which I suspect is informed by Dylan's investigations into so many great American songbooks over these recent years.

To my ear, this is someone making an inventory of what is left that matters; the succour of a muse, a creature made from spare parts, the refusal to throw your shoes into to the crowd in an act of glib showmanship, rather it piles up all these whispered endearments, pleas, citations, asides, villainous threats and one particularly audacious passage in which Generals Grant, Zukhov and Patton are all cited as having cleared a path for "Presley to sing".

I cannot think of another songwriter who would have proposed such a verse and it is such that makes this a record for the hours and the ages. We all of us live in The Time Of Homer… Simpson, that is. Dylan's words and music dwell at the fork in the road where the Other Homer and the roadmaster, Bill Monroe, trade secrets.

Alan Pasqua (pianist on Murder Most Foul)

He handed me a stack of lyrics, I’m reading through it and he’s talking about Bird [Charlie Parker] and Bud Powell, in addition to everything about JFK. I’m looking at him like, ‘What?’ Then we started playing it and it’s all free time. At a moment like that, I had to be just be focused on his vocal, what he wrote. I don’t want to play the wrong chord. It’s an intuitive process at that point.

I went out to the studio and just hung out for awhile. Benmont [Tench] was there, who I was so happy to see. I think he’s the greatest. Bob was in the recording studio and we were out, just kind of hanging. We weren’t in there yet. We waited for quite a while. Then it was like, “OK, fellows. Let’s do it.” Bob played what he had recorded already and wanted us to play on top of it. We went in the room and did our parts live.

Benmont was playing organ. I’m playing piano. Bob is playing guitar. The producer’s name was Blake Mills. Fiona Apple was already on it. She’d already recorded her part…The whole thing is in free time. There’s no tempo or anything. I turned to him and said, “Bob, this like A Love Supreme.” He just kind of looked at me. He didn’t say anything. It was so, so special. If he had [saxophonists] Archie Shepp or Pharoah Sanders come in to play on top of it, it would have totally fit. Even though it wasn’t jazz, all these lines are being blurred big time.

I was 11 when JFK was assassinated. It was a big deal. That whole period of time with Martin Luther King and Bobby [Kennedy]…that was a big weight. A heavy, heavy thing.

Bob was playing guitar and singing live. I love him. I just think he’s very special. Over the years, I wish I could play with him more. It would be so interesting now. I could probably bring something to the music now I couldn’t bring back then.