Why Modern Times is the ultimate Bob Dylan guessing game

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Get our Now Hear This email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “Today is the day I’m going to grab my trombone and blow,” he announces in the opening exchanges of “Thunder on the Mountain”, the first track on 2006’s not particularly culturally in-focus Modern Times. “Nettie Moore” sits in there as a work of broken and untouched genius the same way “Make You Feel My Love” did, until Adele brought it to a different audience, while Dylan’s odd interaction with modernity continues with Scarlett Johansson’s appearance in the video of “When the Deal Goes Down”, where heartbreak lives in every other line: “We live and we die, we know not why/ but I’ll be with you when the deal goes down”. I giggled at “Like a Rolling Stone” being entirely undecipherable until the third chorus, like I was in on the joke with Dylan, before he sucker-punched me with an equally unrecognisable rendition of Modern Times centrepiece “Workingman Blues 2,” a song he had only just released. I won’t ever get that moment back, but fortunately Modern Times is with us forever and in my sole moment to talk you round, I would encourage you towards the record, carefully but unconditionally.