About I Contain Multitudes

"I Contain Multitudes" is a song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, the opening track on his 39th studio album, Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). It was released as the album's second single on April 17, 2020, through Columbia Records. The title of the song is taken from Section 51 of the poem "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman. The song was released, unannounced, less than a month after Dylan's previous single, "Murder Most Foul". The two singles were the first original material released by Dylan since his 2012 album Tempest. "I Contain Multitudes" reached #5 on Billboard's "Rock Digital Song Sales" chart.

Dylan has long been fascinated by the concept of the multiplicity of the self, evident in everything from his fondness for Arthur Rimbaud's phrase "Je est un autre" ("I is another"), which he said caused bells to go off when he first read it in the 1960s, to the lyrics of his Rastafari-influenced 1983 song "I and I". In an interview to promote Time Out of Mind in 1997, Dylan said, "I change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time. It doesn't even matter to me". A paraphrase of this last quote is spoken by Richard Gere's Billy the Kid character via voice-over narration in Todd Haynes' unconventional 2007 biopic I'm Not There (which features the subtitle "Inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan" and takes Dylan's constantly-changing persona explicitly as its subject). Dylan's chameleon-like nature had caused critics to use Walt Whitman's line "I contain multitudes" in relation to him long before he ever wrote a song by that title. Dylan himself quoted the line in an interview for the 2019 documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese.