Is Bob Dylan working on new music?
The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer visited an Upstate New York recording studio last week, in between tour dates on the Outlaw Music Festival. Dylan performed at the Empower FCU Amphitheater at Lakeview in Syracuse on Sunday and at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center the previously weekend.
The Times Union reports Dylan spent two days at White Lake Studios in Colonie on Tuesday and Wednesday. The studio said Dylan and members of his band entered the facility with “essential personnel.”
White Lake Studios CEO David Bourgeois wouldn’t specify if the sessions included any new material for a possible upcoming album, but said Dylan was “kind and pleasant and at one point or another had an exchange with everybody.”
“I had an opportunity to tell him how pleased I was that he was there,” he told the Albany newspaper. “At one point, I ran into him in a hallway and asked him how everything was going. He was very positive.”
Dylan, who used to live in Woodstock, N.Y., is no stranger to recording music in the region. Dylan famously made “The Basement Tapes” at the Big Pink house, in West Saugerties, with The Band in the 1960s.
Dylan is currently touring with Willie Nelson on the 10th edition of the country legend’s Outlaw Music Festival. They performed at SPAC on Aug. 2, in New Hampshire on Aug. 3, at Darien Lake Amphitheater on Aug. 8, at Hersheypark in Pennsylvania on Aug. 9, and at the Amp in Syracuse on Aug. 10.
Dylan’s Syracuse performance included songs spanning his career, including “All Along the Watchtower,” “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” He did not speak about any potential new music during the show.
Dylan, 83, is one of the most storied musicians of all time. He’s a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame; received multiple Grammy Awards, a Nobel Prize and a Pulitzer Prize; and influenced countless artists with songs like “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “The Man in Me,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
His life has also been adapted for the big screen multiple times, including in the recent biopic “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothee Chalamet.
Dylan’s last studio album, “Shadow Kingdom,“ was released in 2023.