New Bob Dylan Album "Together Through Life" Due April 28th

Bob Dylan has got a new one in his bag. The 67 year-old legendary rocker, currently on tour in Europe, will release Together Through Life on April 28th, and the album cover's got some raunchy backseat car action. Dylan's last studio album was 2006's Modern Times, which peaked at Number One on the Billboard Top 200 and went platinum. The last prior Dylan album to do both was 1975's Desire.

Sitting down with author Bill Flanagan, who asked Dylan about the new album's style - it plays like a 50s Chess Record - Dylan explained how the album evolved from a song for director Olivier Dahan's new film, My Own Love Song. Dylan wrote the track "Life Is Hard" for the film's main character who road trips from Kansas City to New Orleans.

"We started off with "Life Is Hard" and then the record sort of took its own direction." Dylan says of the inspiration. "These new songs have more of a romantic edge."

"The sound is uncluttered," Dylan said further elaborating on the Chess sound. "There's power and suspense. The whole vibration feels like it could be coming from inside your mind. It's alive. It's right there. Kind of sticks in your head like a toothache."

Dylan admitted that it sounds significantly different than Modern Times, an album he now says brought his repertoire up to date by having a particular audience in mind when he wrote it. Anyone remember Modern Times' Alicia Keys namecheck in "Thunder On The Mountain"? Very Generation Z.

On Together Through Life, which in addition to "Life Is Hard" boasts the tune "My Wife's Home Town," Dylan didn't really have a focus on the audience.

"There didn't seem to be any general consensus among my listeners," he said. "Some people preferred my first period songs. Some, the second. Some, the Christian period. Some, the post Colombian. Some, the Pre-Raphaelite. Some people prefer my songs from the nineties. I see that my audience now doesn't particular care what period the songs are from. They feel style and substance in a more visceral way and let it go at that. Images don't hang anybody up. Like if there's an astrologer with a criminal record in one of my songs it's not going to make anybody wonder if the human race is doomed. Images are taken at face value and it kind of freed me up."

For more from his interview with Flanagan head here.