Concert Reviews

While casual fans might have been confused, Dylan’s Leader Bank Pavilion concert was perfect for the people who love him, warts and all.

Bob Dylan, with Brittney Spencer and Jimmie Vaughan, at Leader Bank Pavilion, Boston, July 16, 2026.

It turned out that this week’s eerily smoky skies were the perfect backdrop for Bob Dylan’s spooky, stunning return to Boston on Thursday. 

Hunched behind his keyboard, his jacket hood pulled up over the top of his head, the 85-year-old legend seemed almost like a specter from another time before he even croaked out his first note. And what he did after that only solidified that notion — like some kind of cryptic street preacher from the 1800s, he mesmerized the Leader Bank Pavilion crowd with spine-tingling stories of false prophets, midnight riders, and rivers of blood that felt like they’d been crafted specifically for his gnarled vocal instrument. (Because of course they were.)

First things first: There’s a lot of talk about Dylan’s being “indecipherable” or mumbly in his later years, but Thursday’s performance had none of that: Every word was clear as a bell, albeit a creaky, worn one. Say what you will about Bob’s voice, he still sounds like Bob Dylan — and then some.

As for the songs themselves, it’s true that Bob’s been notorious for changing the arrangements of his classics until they were beyond recognition (he’s said he gets uncomfortable when people sing along with him). But these days his solution seems to be to simply not do them — maybe because he can’t sing them like he used to, or maybe because he just doesn’t “feel” them anymore: It’s probably the rare octogenarian who could relate to anything that came out of them when they were 25.

As a result, Dylan barely dipped his toe into his massive catalog in the 16-song set, and his early output — i.e. the stuff you know — was mostly ignored. Instead, he leaned on his “recent” work (say, the last 40 years), and it was a good call: He seemed to totally inhabit those songs, chewing each line and spitting them out in a way that made you feel every word. 

There were a few exceptions to his no-classics rule: The show-opening “Watching the River Flow” was a sly, slippery version that was nonetheless immediately recognizable, with Dylan leaning into the song’s bluesy, meandering Bob-ishness. (And I think I heard him change the verse about somebody “that was really shook” to someone “whose goose was really cooked,” which felt like an improvement.)

He recited more than sang “It Ain’t Me Babe” — his lone song from the 1960s to make an appearance — but the funky yacht-rock accompaniment from his stellar band more than carried it along. And the chorus received a big ovation, likely because that’s when a lot of people first realized it was a song they knew. “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” meanwhile, was served well by a quirky jazz-noir style that would have felt at home in a club populated by gangsters and hooligans in some 1940s detective movie. (In black-and-white, of course.)

But it was with the “newer” material — again, not especially new — that Dylan truly enchanted. He brought just the right amount of eerie menace to “Man in the Long Black Coat,” and “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” from 1997’s Grammy-winning “Time out of Mind,” fully realized the album version’s resigned melancholy, even as Bob subtly played with the intonation, making lines like “When you think that you’ve lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more” sound almost like a question rather than a statement.

“False Prophet,” meanwhile, was the first song Bob brought out from 2020’s “Rough and Rowdy Ways” — he’d eventually do five — and he approached it with a dark mischief that felt almost diabolical. As he croaked, “I’m the enemy of treason, the enemy of strife, I’m the enemy of the unlived, meaningless life,” you could practically hear the sneaky wink behind the words. 

The wonderful thing about seeing Dylan now, in 2026, is to hear how he’s incorporated into his performances all the various styles he’s embraced over his career, particularly in recent years: blues, standards, be-bop, swing jazz, traditional American folk (which he’s called “archaic” music). And unlike, say, a Sinatra, he really had no voice to “lose” — instead, he’s shaped his expressive croak into however it’s best served him over the years. 

This was true even in the three covers he pulled out: Bo Diddley’s “I Can Tell,” in which Dylan churned out the lyric “I can tell you don’t love me no more” like someone who’s said it more than once; and sad, sweet versions of Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Share Your Love With Me” and Jerry Lee Lewis’s “I’ll Make It All Up To You.” No one goes to see Bob Dylan to hear him sing other people’s songs, but woven into this particular show, these definitely felt like they belonged.

As for the performance as a whole, it was typical Bob: Dylan and his band were playing within seconds of taking the stage, and barely paused between songs, even for applause. In a classic move, he had the side-stage screens — which were used for both openers — turned off, so if you were in the back, you were left to squint at Bob’s hooded head bobbing up and down behind the piano. Most of the time it was hard to say if his keyboard was even attached to anything, but with that stellar band — Joel Paterson and Julian Lage on guitars, Tony Garnier on bass, and Anton Fig on drums — who cares? Despite some recent drama, the current lineup seemed perfectly suited to bring these songs to life. 

Granted, even if you’ve resigned yourself to Dylan’s mostly-modern setlist, some choices remained head-scratching. How does “Under the Red Sky,” from the (justifiably) forgotten 1990 album of the same name, make the cut, but nothing from Dylan’s last bonafide front-to-back classic, 2001’s “Love and Theft”? But when Bob — finally, after 13 songs! — busted out the harmonica at the end of that number, all was forgiven: Typical of Dylan, this was not Toots Thielemans-level harp playing, but it got a standing ovation anyway.

Dylan had two stellar openers: Brittney Spencer won the crowd over with a natural charisma, closing with a version of Dylan’s “To Make You Feel My Love” that was (yes, I’ll say it) better than Adele’s. And Jimmie Vaughan has aged into a true Texas blues elder statesman, still playing the guitar behind his head like nobody’s business. But I think the crowd would have been perfectly satisfied if the entire show had been Dylan’s 85-minute set.

As Dylan finished a loose, poignant version of “I Shall Be Released” to close the show — I think he may have offered a small wave, and then he was gone — it was clear that this had been a concert for people who love Bob Dylan, warts and all. If you’re someone who only knows Bob’s early radio hits, or who has the “A Complete Unknown” as your only exposure to the strange and fascinating school of Dylanology, you’d no doubt be at least somewhat perplexed. 

But if you’ve followed Dylan down every twist and turn of his long and winding road of a career, and have enjoyed even the quirkiest detours, Thursday night’s show was perfect.

Setlist for Bob Dylan at Leader Bank Pavilion, Boston, July 17, 2026 

• Watchin’ the River Flow (from “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume II,” 1971)
• Man in the Long Black Coat (from “Oh Mercy,” 1989)
• It Ain’t Me, Babe (from “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” 1964)
• Tryin’ to Get to Heaven (from “Time Out of Mind,” 1991)
• False Prophet (from “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” 2020)
• I Can Tell (Bo Diddley cover)
• Black Rider (from “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” 2020)
• Share Your Love With Me (Bobby “Blue” Bland cover)
• When I Paint My Masterpiece (from “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume II,” 1971) 
• I’ll Make It All Up To You (Jerry Lee Lewis cover)
• Crossing the Rubicon (from “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” 2020)
• Soon After Midnight (from “Tempest,” 2012)
• Under the Red Sky (from “Under the Red Sky,” 1990)
• I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You (from “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” 2020)
• Goodbye Jimmy Reed (from “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” 2020)
• I Shall Be Released (from “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume II,” 1971)

Peter Chianca

General Assignment Editor

Peter Chianca, Boston.com’s general assignment editor since 2019, is a longtime news editor, columnist, and music writer in the Greater Boston area.

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