The ‘end times’: Dylan’s nine crucial questions

With the worrying global implications of conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Bob Dylan’s hauntingly apocalyptic song ‘Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)’ gains a riveting new relevance today

Probably the best known track from Bob Dylan’s Street Legal album, released 45 years ago, in June 1978, Señor (Tales of Yankee Power) is also the song from that album that Dylan has played most live, and the one from the album which has been covered most by other artists.

Epic in scope, mythic and grimly eschatological, the song poses a series of nine key questions across seven verses, put anxiously to ‘Señor’ by the narrator, a humble manservant, retainer, or travelling companion evidently of lower rank, a kind of Spanish-American Everyman.

Composed as musical ‘bridges’, having a different chord structure and melody, the third and fifth verses confirm the narrator as the centre of the action and provide commentaries on his situation and perhaps how he arrived there. With his searching questions, the narrator is indeed the protagonist, while ‘Señor’ remains aloof and silent.

The location, in Mexico or maybe the borderlands, seems timeless, and the musical setting pensive in a minor key but with an atmospheric Mex-Moorish flourish unusual among Dylan’s musical styles, his vocal performance…