Last Night in Dublin (by Laura Tenschert)

2025-11-25, 3Arena, Dublin, Ireland

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Last night, Bob Dylan concluded his year of touring—85 shows total—in Dublin. It was the final night of the latest leg of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, which he’s already teased will continue on next spring.

If you’ve been following the fall tour, you know that after the setlist not changing one iota for weeks, in the final days finally there were some surprises. “Going Down to Bangor” in Belfast. “Lakes of Pontchartrain” in Killarney. And last night in Dublin?

To tell us all about it is Laura Tenschert. Tenschert is the host of the essential podcast Definitely Dylan. This time last year, I was on the program talking about the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour coming to an end. Whoops. But it’s a great show and usually her guests don’t put their foot in their mouth as much as I did.

Here’s Laura Tenschert reporting in on the final night of the latest leg of what I will continue to call the Never Ending Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour:

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A popular aphorism attributed to pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus posits that “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Last night a young fan from Poland, asked me what it was like to see Dylan through the decades – in my case, 2002-25 – and I said that it’s always different, not just because what’s happening on stage changes, but because we ourselves are different every time.

On paper, Bob Dylan’s shows have not changed much since he embarked on the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour back in 2021. The setlist has remained largely the same, as have four of the five players onstage. And yet, if you’re someone who follows this newsletter, you know how much things evolve. “Everything’s flowing, all at the same time”.

I saw the Brighton show on the 7th of November and was amazed at how different it felt from when I had last seen him at the Royal Albert Hall a year ago: Anton Fig’s fantastic drumming completely transformed the sound, but Dylan also cumulatively spent probably half an hour of that Brighton concert’s running time jamming extended intros on the guitar (you can find my in-depth review of that show on Patreon). That was less than three weeks ago, and last night in Dublin was different yet again. There was hardly any guitar, not even on the opener. In fact, there was no long intro at all. Dylan took the stage to a standing ovation in the disappointingly bright 3Arena and started singing pretty much straight away.

From the beginning, his vocals were an immediate and commanding presence in the room. It’s remarkable how good he still sounded on the last of 26 concerts this tour. Sometimes it really feels like his voice has aged backwards over the past decade or two. Speaking of aging backwards, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” will never not be an ingenious way for 84 year-old Bob to start the show!

The next song qualifies this commitment somewhat, making sure to manage our expectations. “It Ain’t Me Babe,” the only song on which Dylan played guitar last night, can sometimes come across as biting, but the current arrangement is rather cheerful, and, when he was singing the chorus, I noted down that he sounded almost relieved to clarify all the things he is not – much like he says in Dont Look Back, “god, I’m glad I’m not me”.

Before the show started, my friend Brian from Dublin had spotted a few people in the crowd worth mentioning. Paul Brady, who played the same Belfast venue the night after Dylan and was likely on Bob’s mind when he covered “Lakes of Pontchartrain” in Killarney, since Brady was the one who taught him the song. Brian also pointed out Booker Prize-winning writer Roddy Doyle, DJ and broadcaster Dave Fanning, and singer Imelda May.

The first two songs had received enthusiastic cheers from the crowd, as you might expect with material from the '60s, but the refrain of “I Contain Multitudes” was met with just as much whooping and applause, confirming that this is already a classic Dylan song. The band was really leaning into the stabs on the Anne Frank/Indiana Jones/Rolling Stones verse, and the pink pedal pushers verse featured some upsinging that took me back to 2002.

“False Prophet” was the first highlight for me, with Dylan fully locked in on the vocals – “you girls mean business,” he sings, before drawing out “and I – DO – TOO”. Indeed. In the light of recent happenings in the Dylan fan community, I couldn’t help but hear a certain urgency in “I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head”. Also pretty interesting, after the line about marrying someone to a ball and chain there was a low guitar sliding up that sounded like a revving motor.

For me, “False Prophet” kicked off a near-flawless five-song run that continued with “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. As much as I enjoyed Dylan’s guitar riffs on the intro in Brighton, it was nice to hear Bob Britt’s guitar more clearly last night, especially in the interplay with the piano. At times the tempo felt on the verge of being a little fast, and Dylan slightly struggled to get all the lyrics in, but when they landed, they did so with precision. Some truly beautiful moments, like the line “someday everything’s gonna be different”, which he began on a high note that he then echoed on the piano. The majestic middle eight about sailing round the world deservedly received many cheers.

“Black Rider” is another highlight of this set for me, and so even though last night’s might not have been my favourite version of this song, it was still wonderful. The current arrangement with Doug Lancio’s acoustic guitar mimicking a mandolin makes the song sound even more similar to Leonard Cohen’s “Traveling Light” than the album version.

In Brighton, “My Own Version of You” sounded like a sparsely scored dramatic monologue, and while I had heard there was a new arrangement, I wasn’t prepared for how heavy and menacing it sounded, while still leaving plenty of space for Dylan to spin the yarn. This must be such a fun song to repeatedly translate into music since the lyrics are so atmospheric. The current stabby arrangement and descending lines are perfect for a song that includes a descent into the underworld and a threat of sticking a knife into someone’s ribs. When Dylan isn’t singing, the band erupt into something even more violent. The 3Arena was selling popcorn as a snack, which struck me as silly before the show, but at this point I wished I had some because this song felt like watching a thriller.

Maybe Dylan was looking forward to heading home, or maybe he wanted to make sure there was time for an extra song (spoiler!), because not only was there no extended guitar intro to “To Be Alone With You” like in Brighton, last night it felt like he started singing before the band had even properly settled into a groove. This song is now a boogie, which gave the piano plenty of time to shine. I noticed some new lyrics on this tour, but I can’t fully make them out – “They say the nighttime is the right time to hold each other tight / [something] daytime, right there in the night”?

Recently, Bob Britt’s guitar playing has been an absolute delight. Since Donnie Herron’s departure, it seems he’s had permission to shine a little more, and one great example is the blues lick he plays to kick off “Crossing the Rubicon”. Last night’s was especially great, starting high and contorting itself downwards to where it was met by the rest of the band. It was in fact so good that it took Bob a couple of beats to come in with the vocals. This is another song where the verses are understated and restrained, before all hell breaks loose on the instrumental, which strikes me as a great compromise to make room for Bob’s vocals without taming the band’s sound entirely. Because why would you want to tame this great band?

Unlike in Brighton where my seats had “restricted view” (meaning I could only see Doug Lancio), last night I could see the whole stage, as well as the curly top of Bob Dylan’s head. Maybe I’ve fully gaslit myself into not caring whether I actually see his face or maybe I’ve cycled through the stages of grief and reached acceptance that he just doesn’t care to be seen. The show is nonetheless a sight to behold. It’s set up like a chamber play, just five men and their instruments. There are no stagehands to change instruments, no outside forces interrupting whatever zone the players are in.

After “Crossing the Rubicon”, the drums swelled and led straight into “Desolation Row”. After 60 years, this song doesn’t seem to have lost its sense of humour, which still comes across in the way Dylan delivers the lines. Last night there were two great instrumentals (though no harp) flanking a final verse that started out quiet and conspiratorial (with a great “was that some kind of joke?”) and builds and builds (“and give them all another name!”) towards an energetic outro.

When it comes to the places Dylan sings about in his songs, the spiritual journey from “Desolation Row” to “Key West” needs to be studied: from desolation to paradise divine. In Brighton, “Key West” had far more prominent drums, while in Dublin there was no steady beat propelling the song forward, which meant it simply levitated. Towards the end, there was some distracting commotion as two audience members, who apparently had taken the tour’s rough and rowdy motto a little too literally, were escorted out by security. Afterwards I learned that a few more people got ejected from the show, some for filming.

Unfortunately, because the arena was so bright, these disturbances were hard to ignore, and so I don’t have many notes for “Watching the River Flow” other than “great performance”, so there you go. But at least that allows me to swiftly move to another highlight, “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue”, which was pretty much perfect. This arrangement brings out a completely new side to the song: there’s a wistfulness in the chords which don’t resolve as neatly as they do in the folky original. Listen to how he sings “The vagabond who’s rapping at your door is standing in the clothes that you once wore / Strike another match, go start anew / Yes it’s all over now, baby blue”. We understand that the finality of the lyrics now comes at a greater cost than it did six decades ago. Sometimes I think Dylan waits until he needs to elevate an already perfect moment, and then brings in the harmonica, which is why we got our first harp on the outro of “Baby Blue”, and he played it as delicately as a harp can be played. I had always heard that Irish crowds are great, and the audience last night was indeed beautifully expressive in their appreciation and this song got an appropriately warm reception and a standing ovation at the end.

While “Baby Blue” is a song about endings, “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” marks the new beginning that comes with a big decision or dedication. I noted down that it was the most beautiful vocal I’ve ever heard, and, reader, I meant it. You should listen to this version – the way he sings “I don’t think that anybody else ever knew” and the extra drawn out “lotta people gone”, and the way the band dance around the vocal. Gorgeous.

The next song, “Mother of Muses”, gave Bob Britt another moment to shine. He’s recently switched to playing lap steel, and this new addition really makes the song for me. This song is so stately and regal, the weeping steel adds a sentimentality that really works. Fig’s drumming also deserves a special mention. His playing varies from verse to verse, but I especially love when he switches to a military march on the verse about the generals. Every single version of this song I’ve ever heard culminates in a great delivery of the line, “I’m travelin’ light and I’m slow coming home”, but of course it felt particularly meaningful on the last night of the tour.

“Thank you!” came a voice from behind the piano, and the woman behind me exclaimed, “He speaks!” Dylan told us that these are not easy songs to play “but this band is playing them pretty well, don’t you think?” I think I first heard that line in New York in 2023, but he’s still right. After he introduced his excellent band (Doug Lancio, Bob Britt, Tony Garnier, Anton Fig), they started up a shuffling version of “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”, which featured a few lyric changes. For example he sang, “They threw everything at me, everything in the book / I had nothing to fight back with, I guess I had what it took”, which seems like an evolution from the “butcher’s hook,” like an assertion of confidence to match the theme of artistic integrity and making a name for yourself in a cut-throat business.

“Every Grain of Sand” is one of my favourite Bob Dylan songs, and I highly suspect that it’s also one of Bob Dylan’s favourite Bob Dylan songs. You can hear it in the way he sings it and has chosen it as the song to close out this highly curated setlist. Last night’s version was stunning. Towards the end of the outro, he reached for the harp again, and it brought the house down. Another standing ovation. If that had been the final song of the night, it would have been a wonderful way to close the show, but no one on stage made any move to leave, which suggested that there was more to come.

I hope you find an audience recording of what followed [editor’s note: you will] just so you can hear how the room exploded with excited cheers when they played the first notes of The Pogues’ “Rainy Night in Soho”. Dylan had covered this song in Phoenix back in May, but of course a Pogues performance in Dublin is bound to have a special energy. It was a true privilege to witness. Apparently Victoria Mary Clarke, Shane MacGowan’s widow, was in the audience and tweeted about this “special anniversary gift” – MacGowan passed away almost exactly two years ago on the 30th of November, 2023.

When I bought my ticket for the Dublin show and agreed to write this review, I wondered if this was going to be the final “farewell to Rough and Rowdy Ways”. After all, we’ve been tricked into thinking that the finishing end was at hand several times before (spring 2024, autumn 2024, spring 2025?). Thankfully, this time Bob saved us the embarrassment by preemptively announcing that the tour would continue in the spring of next year. Yet another reason why “Rainy Night in Soho” was the perfect song to end last night’s concert, because what better way to sum up Bob Dylan’s approach to playing shows than the line, “I’m not talking of the first times / I never think about the last”.

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Thanks Laura! Subscribe to Definitely Dylan wherever you get podcasts. If you support the show on Patreon, you get a bunch of bonus content.

2025-11-25, 3Arena, Dublin, Ireland

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Catch up on other Fall 2025 Rough and Rowdy show reviews by more excellent guest writers: