Matthew Ingate’s book Together Through Life: My Never Ending Tour with Bob Dylan is our September 2025 Bob Dylan Book Club-Book-of-the-Month. Even though Dylan is 84 (as of May 24, 2025), even though we can easily infer that he doesn’t need the money, and even though his renown has been firmly established (by no less than a Nobel Prize)—despite all this, he continues to perfrom “roughly 100” concerts each year. Why is this so? Here are some possible answers to this question:
First, performance provides Dylan with a direct connection to his audience, a connection he cares about, even if he is renown for following his own drummer (in more ways than one!). Second, performance is the testing ground on which Dylan connects to his own songs and finds opportunities to reimagine them and create new meanings from them. Third, performance provides him with a potential portal to creativity. As one Dylan fan, Liam MacNally wrote (mayonews.ie): “He creates and re-creates, not living in the past or wishing for the future just working on the eternal now” (Mr. Tambourine Man, “let me forget about today until tomorrow”). As a Dylan’s concert begins, I think Dylan fans, too, can experience a magical and timeless space that is also free of life’s normal context, a place without yesterdays or tomorrows. Fourth, in The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan’s essays show that he clearly values artists who perform a song in a such a heartfelt manner that they “make the song their own”. And last, Raphael Falco in his book No One To Meet: Imitation and Originality in the Songs of Bob Dylan (2022) writes that it is in performance that Dylan creates the sense of authority that permeates his work.

“Bob Dylan is the greatest teacher I’ve ever had. He has taken me on trips through the ages by slipping references to literature, music, films, poetry, art, history and cultural figures and events into his own lyrics and covered other artists who I have gone on to love, as well, whom I likely would never have found without the illumination of his work.”
— Matthew Ingate

The importance of performance in Dylan’s own words:
Dylan’s song My Own Version of You (from Rough and Rowdy Ways, 2020) has been seen as an allegory of his song writing and performance. He puts together songs from many parts but, just as with the original Frankenstein, the true test of his work comes when he attempts to breathe life into his creation, something that takes place, literally and figuratively, on stage.
The Ed Bradley interview has this interchange on Dylan’s continued dedication to performance:
Bradley: Why do you still do it — why are you still out here?
Dylan: Well, it goes back to the destiny thing. I made a bargain with it a long time ago and I’m holding up my end.
Bradley: What was your bargain?
Dylan: To get where I am now.
Dylan in The Philosophy of Modern Song:
”As in comedy, where a seemingly simple sentence can transform into a joke through the magic of performance, an inexplicable thing happens when words are set to music. The miracle is their union.”
The last paragraph of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize Lecture: “Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page.”
The Never Ending Tour, a title Bob Dylan dislikes, started in 1988, took a break for the pandemic, and began a full schedule of dates again in late 2021. When asked about the title, he replied “do you call a plumber a never ending plumber?” Performing is what he does, who he is. It’s not simply a job he takes on.
From the 1965 San Francisco Interview:
Q: Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or as a poet?
A: Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y'know.

Matthew Ingate’s book brings us into the experiences of those who follow Dylan around the world. He brings us the positive energy, discovery, and the captivating nature of his travels. He brings us the sense of awe of just being in the same room with Dylan. But even before entering that room, his book is a story that involves new friendships and reuniting with others who travel to multiple shows each year, new places and scenery, observations of local history and culture, as well as visits to Dylan- and music-associated historic sites. As Matthew describes, the importance of Dylan’s performances is not just the fact of it—there are all kinds of changes going on and surprises are delivered along the way. From night to night there can be variation in the set lists, arrangements, and lyrics. Venues may differ in the visual setting for the songs. From one tour to another, band members may come and go. Over the years there have been changes in Bob’s singing voice.
Changes to musical arrangements may or may not have been announced to the band and are unlikely to have been rehearsed. Band members have to be on their toes, with eyes mostly locked on Dylan but with Tony Garnier, Bob’s long-standing bass player being an important reference point. All band members need to read each other’s facial expressions and body language.
Then there is Bob Talk (what he says to the audience and which may include witticisms and reference to geograpy and other artists), band introductions, and his choice of cover songs (are they significant to time and place?).
Dedicated concert goers try to capture all of the changes and to compare album versions, outtakes, concert recordings, and other live performances we’ve experienced.
As one review of Ingate’s book pointed out, deep-dive Dylan fans go to shows with a 180 degree different purpose than most folks going to see classic bands—they go, not to reexperience the album version of the song, but for the changes, the way he breathes new life into songs. This also means, as the reviewer said, that Dylan produces lasting art, not just one song, not just one mood or meaning. While these comments about his perfmorances are “old hat” to deep Dylan fans, it seems inevitable that casual fans who expect to hear replication of studio albums will be disappointed!

Matthew Ingate was born and raised in and around London, England. He has been working in the music industry for a little over ten years, including a long stint at one of the worlds leading music publishers. He has also been been involved in The Unsigned Music Awards, acting as a judge for the Best Blues & Jazz and Best Country & Folk categories, as well as appearing on BBC1's The Apprentice as a "music expert" in 2020, and he is also a features writer for Far Out Magazine. Matthew first fell under the spell of Bob Dylan at a young age, around ten or eleven years old, and was sold on a combination of hearing the old music from the 60s and seeing the old-er man in his 60s for the first time in 2011. Since then, he has seen Dylan live in every year that Dylan has toured, including shows all across the world in cities like London, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, Memphis, Tokyo, Barcelona and beyond.
Connect to Matthew Ingage through Substack. That site has an index of his podcast interviews (among them Infinity Goes Up on Trial, The Daily Dylan Podcast, Blue Bob, and Pod Dylan:
Together Through Life - Listen on Spotify - Linktree
Here is a direct link to the Daily Dylan interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaoMh7eg6ig
A review of his book appeared on the Crazy on Classic Rock website:
https://crazyonclassicrock.com/2022/04/06/review-together-through-life-my-never-ending-tour-with-bob-dylan/

The Bob Dylan Book Club Book List includes 21 books in the category On Tour/Performance, as well as 7 books by Paul Williams on this subject.
Previous Books-of-the-Month also have addressed the significance of performance in Dylan’s art:
Erin Callahan and Court Carney’s The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances: Play a Song for Me
Andrew Muir’s Bob Dylan & William  Shakespeare: The True Performing of It
Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song, Part 1, Part 2
Larry Starr’s Listening to Bob Dylan: Experiencing and Re-Experiencing Dylan’s Music

—Peter White, September 2025