“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” Bob Dylan sings every night on his recently begun “Long Hot Summer ’26” tour, keeping a song from his most recent album, 2020’s “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” in play as a staple of his setlist. It’s a beautiful affirmation, as one of the purest love songs in his recent catalog, and an outlier in that regard. But it does raise a question: Can you make up your mind to give yourself to Bob Dylan?
It’s a question to keep in mind because this outing, like a lot of the touring that preceded it, does ask you to meet him halfway, without a lot of hand-holding, and certainly no verbal assurances, as he remains as mute between songs as ever. Bluntly put, this is a fantastic show that he’s taken on the road, but appreciating it as such perhaps may require a willingness to surrender to a vibe. With dim lighting, a setlist featuring a lot more deep cuts than world-famous classics, and a hooded central figure who seems to grow more mysterious right before our eyes, the mood is somewhere between “the after-hours roadhouse of your dreams” and “eternity’s waiting room.”
Saturday night, I caught up with the tour at the Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, California, the third of four stops he is making in Southern California (none of which are actually in L.A. County, because that’s Dylan for you). I spotted a few quiet walkouts in my section of the floor halfway or two-thirds of the way through his Tight Ninety, from folks who were presumably realizing that this was not for them. I also intuited that more attendees around me than not were fully in their bliss. They had made up their minds to… well, you know… and their faith was rewarded with as rich of an experience, in its fashion, as any of the more easily encapsulated performances Dylan has done in his long day.
