In order to get a grip on what’s exciting and important about Bob Dylan’s latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, you have to get into the raucous spirit of the main collection of songs — the five songs that really matter. They all seem designed to be played in a packed roadhouse full of hard drinkers. They’re an antidote to what ails an atomized, cowed, COVID-ridden population facing ten different kinds of disaster at once but unable to gather together or conceive of ourselves as a big, rebellious force in the world.

I’ve been listening to the album obsessively for a month, and I’m by no means a Bob Dylan cultist.

Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan’s first collection of original songs in nearly a decade, since 2012’s Tempest, finds the singer-songwriter performing from what sounds like a place that is geographically on the edge of town, socially on the edge of respectability, musically on the edge of “good taste,” and spiritually on the edge of hell. In other words, an American roadhouse.