Well, my heart’s like a river, a river that sings
Just takes me a while to realize things
I’ve seen the sunrise, I’ve seen the dawn
I’ll lay down beside you when everyone’s gone.— Bob Dylan, “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.”
I saw Bob Dylan in concert for only the second time on Thursday, October 16, 2025, in Helsinki, on show #1 (we were first, baby!) of the Fall 2025 Rough and Rowdy Ways tour.
It’s ironic that, despite having lived half my life in Minnesota, I never saw Dylan in the US. Both my Dylan concert experiences have been in Finland.
By way of a smooth transition, Dylan’s last performance before heading to Finland to start his European tour was a 23-minute, five-song set at Farm Aid in Minnesota on September 20th.
What follows is less of a concert review and more of a reflection on aging, creativity, and the spiritual impact of music.
First, a gripe. I’ve had enough of the recent trend on social media where haters post videos of aging rock stars with captions telling them to retire. It’s just dumb! Why would anyone stop doing something they love, especially if people are still buying tickets to see them? It’s none of my business if Roger Daltrey, Neil Diamond, or Rod Stewart wish to keep performing. I found it admirable that Ozzy Osborne took to the stage in a wheelchair just 17 days before his death. Hell, Tiny Tim died on stage in Minneapolis in 1996!
But fighting this trend of hatefulness is pointless. Do I need to point out the obvious that young people making such posts forget that someday, they too will be old?
A senior citizen advocacy group in Wisconsin, which I got to know during my Citizen Action days, shared with me the quote: “Sooner or later, God willing, we all hope to become senior citizens.” Earning the title of “Senior” is closer for some of us than for others, and many—like Dylan himself at age 84—are already well past it.
I’m a spring chicken at 61. Old enough to have been around for what feels like a very long time, long enough to call myself a 40+ year Dylan fan, which started when I ravaged the near-complete (at the time) Dylan record collection of a librarian friend in Monmouth, Illinois, in the summer of 1984.
But as I watched Dylan perform his 100-minute set at Veikkaus Arena in Helsinki this past Thursday, I couldn’t shake the realization I was seeing a man who had already been performing for three years before I was born.
From 1961 to 2025, he’s still at it, and doing it so skillfully, in a way few could ever imagine.
Dylan turned 79 shortly before releasing his 39th studio album, Rough and Rowdy Ways (June 19, 2020). It was his first album of new songs since 2012 and his first since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.
Rough and Rowdy Ways is now one of my favorite Dylan albums, full of contemplative, bluesy, meandering songs. I’ll never forget the day he suddenly released “Murder Most Foul” on March 27th, 2020, just 26 days into the start of the global pandemic. It felt as if there couldn’t have been better timing. I listened to the song repeatedly that day.
Lately, while listening to the full album, which I’ve owned on yellow vinyl since shortly after its release, I’ve found myself drawn to “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” possibly my favorite Dylan song in years.
Key West is the place to be
If you’re looking for immortality
Stay on the road, follow the highway sign
Key West is fine and fair
If you lost your mind, you will find it there
Key West is on the horizon line.
He performed it on October 16th in Helsinki as the 11th song of his 17-song set, along with eight other tracks from Rough and Rowdy Ways. (Setlist.fm puts this at 52.9 % of the songs of the evening’s show coming from the latest album.)
It’s inspiring that Dylan, at 84, was able to perform for 9,000 people and play more than half of the songs he released in the past five years—despite having numerous albums and songs over sixty years old.
A comparable experience was the last time I saw Leonard Cohen perform in Helsinki in 2012, when Cohen was 77. But to put it in perspective, if Leonard Cohen were still alive, he would be 91.
I felt transformed by this Bob Dylan concert experience, which is probably the goal of any concert —to emerge changed. I was sitting in a second-tier balcony—close enough to see Dylan at his piano, but not close enough to make out his face or really any details. There were no projection screens, so the show was all about the music, with the lighting changing only a bit from song to song. It put me in a trance where I could think about not just my life, but Dylan’s life, the history of popular culture, and all of Western Civilization. I found myself thrown back 2,000 years from lines like, “Pick a number between one and two. And I ask myself what Julius Caesar would do” from the song “My Own Version of You.”
Dylan’s creative genius is unmatched, and I marvel at it as a writer, poet, and music fan. It makes it clear to me just how far ahead of AI a human mind still is—especially Dylan’s—because what he creates is so artistically rich and authentic.
The images that flash in my mind’s eye as I listen to Dylan are more than just words and pictures. When Dylan drops names like John F Kennedy, Wolfman Jack, Harry Truman, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Sigmund Freud, Elvis, and Beethoven, you feel a sense of personal connection. The effect it has on you is the realization that we all indeed are (connected). And when you think about the people we’ve lost over the past 60 years and realize some were intimately part of Dylan’s world, it’s no wonder that a song like “I Contain Multitudes” feels so powerful.
In it, Dylan also invokes Walt Whitman, from whom he borrows the phrase for the song’s title.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)– Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1892)