Bob Dylan played ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ for the first time since 2010 on Wednesday night (June 25) – watch a snippet below.
The legendary singer-songwriter opened his set at the FirstBank Amphitheater in Franklin, Tennessee – part of the Outlaw Music Festival 2025 10th Anniversary Tour alongside Willie Nelson – with his 1979 track ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’.
The 84-year-old then went into ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, offering a slow rendition on which he played piano and harmonica while accompanied by his band.
It’s not the only rarely-played hit he’s brought out on the tour, however. When the tour began, he played ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ for the first time in 15 years, while ‘All Along The Watchtower’, which he hasn’t played much in the last decade, has made frequent appearances on the tour.
Bob Dylan’s first performance of The Times They Are A-Changin’ in 16 years — this evening in beautiful Franklin, Tennessee
courtesy of friend of the pod @JAJCenter pic.twitter.com/Q4pwVDaDTL
— Jokermen (@JokermenPodcast) June 26, 2025
Joining Dylan and Nelson on the tour have been the likes of Billy Strings – who played ‘All Along The Watchtower’ with Dylan last month – Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, Trampled By Turtles, Wilco, Sheryl Crow, Turnpike Troubadours, and Waxahatchee. Find tickets for the remaining shows here.
Dylan last played ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, from his 1964 album of the same name, in the East Room of the White House in February 2010, when he appeared at an event to honour the civil rights movement alongside the likes of Joan Baez, Natalie Cole, Jennifer Hudson, John Mellencamp and Smokey Robinson. Until the night itself, nobody knew which song he was going to play for the audience, then-president Barack Obama among them.
“He had mentioned the possibility of also doing ‘Chimes of Freedom’ or ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’,” Bob Santelli, one of the show’s organizers, told Rolling Stone at the time. “Believe me, if Bob had opted to play another song, there wasn’t a person in the house that would have minded.”
Aside from his ongoing tour, Dylan has a book of drawings, Point Blank (Quick Studies) coming out on November 18, and he also narrated a trailer for Machine Gun Kelly’s upcoming album, ‘Lost Americana’, earlier this month.
Dylan was portrayed by Timothée Chalamet in the biopic A Complete Unknown last year, too. “Don’t think twice about seeing this brilliant Bob Dylan biopic,” wrote NME in a four-star review, adding: “If you’re a Bob newbie, you’ll leave the cinema ready to dive into his back catalogue. If you’re already a fan, the next few weeks will be spent making playlists of lesser-known B-sides or reading the lore around a scene you weren’t familiar with. And that’s why it was a good idea to make this film – a mad idea, but a good one.”
Meanwhile, a band called Not Completely Unknown are set to play Glastonbury 2025 this weekend – and fans have speculated that Chalamet could be in line to make an appearance.
