Zimmy’s first nu-Jukebox appearance…

[Video][Website]
[5.67]

Alfred Soto: Other than prominent electric guitar strumming, not much different from other Zimmerman recordings from the Bush/post-Bush era: a midtempo shuffle over which the old buzzard growls travelin’-man tropes. You know he’s feeling amiable when the line about the whistle blowin’ like his woman’s on board barely gets a smirk. 
[6]

Pete Baran: Jolly-reminiscent Bob Dylan is no Bob Dylan at all, and it almost feels that this exists so that on the Never Ending tour Dylan gets to sing the word “blowing” a bit more, clearly his favorite word to sing. But if you are not going to relax into just being a jukebox artist, you do occasionally need a track for people to pop to the loo to, or make the audience feel better when you come and sing “Idiot Wind” (BLOWING) badly again.
[2]

Anthony Easton: The gnostic cowboy returns, and it’s not nearly as much camp fun as his Christmas album. That this cribs from his ’60s work and from ’20s blues makes the old old again. Plus, I find it amusing that someone so obsessed with self-mythology and construction of identity is still playing the authenticity games. 
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: So I guess it took until the Youtube era for him to finally enter the music-video age, and the video’s a pleasantly Dylanesque deconstruction of romantic-comedy tropes, savage reprisals, and surreal posturing — though all of that is more in line with his ’66-’75 work than with anything he’s done post-millennium, including this song, an old-man-on-the-porch sweeper (it could hardly be called a stomper) that free-associates around the backyard and home again. I’m a fool for anything that sounds like the musicians have been listening to a lot of Eddie Lang, but I’m also suspicious of my own foolery; late-period Dylan has been all too easy to love.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Lord help me, I like this. I’ve been checked out for the last couple Dylan records, so I couldn’t say if that settling-cloud guitar figure is Sexton or Kimball or even David Hidalgo. But its tone is really something: the soothing rumble of a box fan leaned against the wall. All the axes in employ form a contented unit: jump blues sails past rock and roll, which whistles at swing. While everyone tries to hand him the keys to the kingdom (or withhold the same), he’s rolling around in some mental garden of his own creation. Cheers to one of the funniest people working.
[8]

Sabina Tang: When my catechism teacher played us hits from the 1960s folk songbook in eighth grade after-school sing-along the Dylan cuts seemed to me particularly gnomic, and my BFF’s explanations only confused me further. Why did “Mr. Tambourine Man” have to be about drugs, for instance? I accepted it, but I couldn’t see it. I’m more apt at sociopolitical contextualization these days, but the old bafflement echoes. Does the Rust Belt metaphor mean the song is about the decline of American industry? Is it an indictment of the profiteers that caused the financial crisis? Is it about a femme fatale? Or inexorable Death hidden under the Maiden’s skirts? Is it okay if I admit in a published venue that I don’t understand a Bob Dylan lyric? Maybe the fact that it defies easy analysis means that it’s poetry. I’ll venture that it’s not tossed-off. There’s an urgency to the words on the page, a foreboding that Bob’s cracked yellowing-acetate delivery undercuts rather than emphasizes. I could hum it back right away after hearing it once, so that’s worth a few points. Plus one whole bonus point for being BOB DYLAN AGAINST STALKING: STALKING IS UNROMANTIC AND INDICATIVE OF BROADER ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOUR PATTERNS, though I have the depressing intimation that much of the Internet will miss the correct takeaway. 
[8]