Last night, Bob Dylan’s ‘Lights of Autumn’ tour came to Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg (what do you mean, of course I knew how to spell that without checking). Since we last checked in with the tour in Denmark, a lot has happened. The long-awaited returns of Time Out of Mind trio “Million Miles” (first since 2014), “Not Dark Yet” (first since 2019), and “Love Sick” (not as long-awaited, but always welcome), plus a wild new arrangement of “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” and the unexpected revival of the Jerry Lee Lewis cover “I Can’t Seem to Say Goodbye,” which he’d played once two years ago after Jerry Lee’s passing.
The setlist surprises continued last night, with the return of a Love & Theft classic he had not played live since 2018! Reporting in for us from Luxembourg is Angus Gibson. Angus is managing editor of the excellent free academic journal The Dylan Review and he writes on Substack at notes on pop music.
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Esch-sur-Alzette is an old iron mining and steelmaking outcrop on Luxembourg’s border with France. It’s just a few brisk steps away from Belgium and Germany, too, at the crossroads of continental Europe.
As I roll into the train station, I think of Hibbing, another iron ore town near the Canadian border. Maybe Bob thinks of his Minnesota home too—especially as he looks out of his tour bus and sees a row of gigantic blast furnaces that once puffed smoke into the blue October sky above tonight’s venue, the descriptively-named Rockhal.
He’s been here before: first in 2011, and then twice more on the Never Ending Tour before a Rough and Rowdy Ways stop in 2024. Now it’s 2026 and Dylan has embarked on his ‘Lights of Autumn’ tour and, as ever, things have changed.
The rhinestone suits are gone. Instead Bob lurks at the back of the stage in a black hoodie looking like a drill rapper who’s learned to play electric piano. Or like the ghost of Vincent Price, his Halloween face lit from below, hiding in plain clothes from a gang of paparazzi that never arrives. Before the tour I was apprehensive about this wardrobe choice, having not seen ‘hoodie Bob’ in my 42 previous shows. I feared it might be a sign that Bob is unhappy—a cry for help, like a moody hooded teenager.
I was wrong. The hoodie is cool. It is confrontational and non-conformist, as much as his razor-pointed Beatle boots, mod shirts and wild hair were in 1966. Today’s casual fans might expect our man to look something like the character played by Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown, or even the old cowboy lovingly parodied by James Austin Johnson on Saturday Night Live. Tonight they get a new Dylan. One who is again eschewing expectations, moving forward with a hood pulled tight over his black baseball cap.
The setlist, too, is happily in flux and bearing the fruit of Dylan’s latest creative burst. It’s less the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour this fall than it is the Time Out of Mind tour, with Dylan reinventing corners of his back catalogue that I’d never thought he’d revisit. Previous nights have given us a new R&B arrangement of “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven”, a version of “Not Dark Yet” that sounds like the Dead doing reggae, and a “Million Miles” that is remarkably similar to the album take. The recent tapes from Bremen and Düsseldorf are exciting and I’m on edge for where Bob might choose to go next.