Last night was the first night of Bob Dylan’s tour of the Far East and Australasia.

On Friday, here and elsewhere, I published an article which argued that more care and consideration should be shown in our critiques of Dylan’s art when we considered his albums and his live performances and argued that at a very minimum we should use his written lyrics as a lexicon to try analyse who he is and what he is speaking about:

If you haven’t read it already you can see it here:

https://twilightdawning.com/2018/07/26/bob-dylan-sloppy-analysis-and-hearing-what-we-want-to-hear/

His opening concert of this tour, which will see him on the road until the end of August, was at the Olympic Gymnastics Arena in Seoul, South Korea. Dylan in recent tours has  concentrated mostly on performing songs from the kind of great American standards that he has featured on his albums Shadows in the Night, Fallen Angels and Triplicate. Judging by last night’s set he maybe moving past that period as he has seemingly begun to change-up the set list.

His choice of songs provides a handy postscript to my article.

Most pertinently for my article he closed his main set with “Gotta Serve Somebody” (I believe it was his 18th song of the night) – the first time he has performed that song in concert for some seven years. Once again, he is directing us to make a choice between serving the devil or serving the Lord.

I wonder which side he would suggest we choose…?