SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2026
Most artists open a tour by reminding you who they are. Bob Dylan opened his Lights of Autumn tour in Oslo on Saturday night, October 17, by reminding everyone that nobody — possibly including the people on stage with him — knows exactly who he is going to be on any given night. At Oslo Spektrum, in a 19-song set played entirely from behind an electric keyboard, Dylan performed a song he had not played since 2005, revived “Tangled Up in Blue” for the first time since 2018 with freshly rewritten verses, debuted two covers he had never played live, and did it all with — reportedly — the sixth guitarist to stand in his band this year. Stereogum, Relix and Far Out all filed on the show, and all three accounts agree on the essentials: this was not a warm-up night. This was a statement.
The Oslo show opened the European and UK leg of the Lights of Autumn tour after a break stretching back to a Nashville date on August 1, and Dylan arrived with the setlist equivalent of a shuffled deck. Only two songs came from Rough and Rowdy Ways, and the tour has dropped that album's billing altogether — a quiet but real changing of the guard for a show that had been built around his most recent album for years. What replaced it was something older, stranger and, for the faithful who track these things setlist by setlist, considerably more exciting.
Back from 2005: “Crash on the Levee”
The deepest dig of the night was “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood).” As Far Out reported, Dylan had not performed the song since 2005 — a gap of more than two decades. The song's own history is pure Dylan archaeology: a Basement Tapes-era composition recorded in 1967 with The Band and eventually released on The Basement Tapes in 1975, it was not performed live at all until 1995. So Saturday's version closed a loop that runs from a basement in 1967, through a first live performance nearly thirty years later, through another twenty-year silence, to a keyboard in Oslo in 2026. Songs do not usually get third acts. This one just did, in front of a Norwegian arena crowd that may or may not have fully known what it was witnessing. The setlists know. The setlists always know.
“Tangled Up in Blue,” rewritten again
If “Crash on the Levee” was the archaeology, “Tangled Up in Blue” was the headline. Played for the first time since 2018, one of Dylan's most beloved songs arrived with verses three through six newly rewritten — Stereogum transcribed the new lyrics from fan clips of the performance. Longtime listeners know Dylan has treated this song as a living draft for decades, shifting its point of view and details across eras, and Saturday's rewrite is the latest proof that he considers even his masterpieces unfinished. There is a particular audacity in taking a song the audience can sing back to you word for word and changing the words. Dylan, characteristically, did it on opening night, in the seventh slot of the set, like it was nothing. For a certain kind of fan, those four rewritten verses are the entire story of this tour launch — proof that at this stage of his career, Dylan is not curating a museum. He is still editing the exhibits.
Two live debuts and a covers-heavy heart
The night also carried two outright live debuts, both covers, both telling, as Relix and Stereogum both reported: Randy Newman's “Louisiana 1927” — Newman's great flood song, which sits naturally beside “Crash on the Levee” in a set quietly full of water — and Guy Clark's “Dublin Blues,” a nod to one of the finest songwriters Texas ever produced. Around them, Dylan folded in Bo Diddley's “I Can Tell,” Bobby Bland's “Share Your Love With Me” and “I'll Make It All Up to You,” associated with both Charlie Rich and Jerry Lee Lewis. Read together, the covers sketch Dylan's record collection better than any interview could: rhythm and blues, soul, country songwriting and New Orleans piano weather, all filtered through a man at an electric keyboard, which is where he stayed for the entire performance.
And then there is the guitarist. Per Stereogum's reporting, the man in the guitar chair in Oslo was reportedly Mike Seal — which makes him the sixth guitarist in Dylan's band in 2026 alone, following Doug Lancio, Bob Britt, Julian Lage, Joel Paterson and Jad Tariq. Six guitarists in a single year is not turnover; it is a rotation policy. Whether it reflects scheduling, restlessness or simply Dylan's lifelong habit of rebuilding his band mid-stride, the Oslo crowd got the newest configuration on its very first night, and by every account it held.
The Oslo setlist, in full
As published by Relix, the complete 19-song set ran: “To Be Alone with You”; “Man in the Long Black Coat”; “Crash on the Levee”; “Tryin' to Get to Heaven”; “Early Roman Kings”; “I Can Tell”; “Tangled Up in Blue”; “Share Your Love With Me”; “Louisiana 1927”; “When I Paint My Masterpiece”; “I'll Make It All Up to You”; “Crossing the Rubicon”; “Soon After Midnight”; “Dublin Blues”; “Under the Red Sky”; “I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”; “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”; and “I Shall Be Released,” with an encore of “You Ain't Goin' Nowhere” — the full setlist as published by Relix and corroborated by Stereogum's report from the show. As opening nights go, it is a setlist with almost no interest in playing it safe — two songs from the most recent album era, a clutch of covers, a 2005 rarity and a rewritten classic.
The tour moves next to Gothenburg, Sweden, where Dylan plays Scandinavium on Monday, October 19, and the run continues into December. If Oslo is the template — rarities up, billing changed, verses rewritten — then every stop on this leg just became a setlist watch. That is the oldest trick in Dylan's book, and in Oslo it worked exactly as designed: nobody left talking about anything else. More music coverage lives in Previously's Music section, including our story on the posthumous D'Angelo album taking shape from the vault.
