BOB DYLAN, PHONES IN OUR POCKETS AND MUSIC IN OUR HEARTS!

Your phone stays with you. You can feel it in your bag and know exactly where it is, but for one evening you cannot take it out to film your favourite song. At Bob Dylan’s concert, its pouch is sealed at the entrance. In front of the stage, eyes, ears and memory do the work.

This is one of the choices shaping the songwriter’s Italian dates. On 2 November Dylan played Milan’s Unipol Dome; the journey continues on 5 November at Rome’s Palazzo dello Sport and on 7 November at the Unipol Arena in Casalecchio di Reno, near Bologna.

He is 85, with a repertoire people discover in very different ways: a song heard at home as a child, an album found at university, a voice recognised on the radio. This time, concertgoers can stay with that encounter without simultaneously preparing a video to send to friends.

The phone is there; filming can wait

The format is called a phone-free show. On arrival, staff help visitors place their phones in sealed Yondr pouches, which they keep with them. To use a phone during the evening, you go to a designated area where the pouch can be opened.

The arrangement is simple, but it changes a deeply rooted habit. A stage lights up and our phone-holding hands rise almost automatically. We check the framing, try to avoid the head in front, wonder whether the sound is recording properly. Meanwhile, the song goes on.

Photographing a happy moment has its own beauty: we can return to it, share it and show someone who was not there. This time Dylan asks his audience for a different experience. You take home what you have managed to follow closely, including details that the person beside you may have experienced quite differently.

What he played in Milan

The Milan setlist is available and contains 18 songs. It begins with Watching the River Flow and ends with I Shall Be Released. In between are It Ain’t Me, Babe, Tangled Up in Blue and Not Dark Yet, alongside more recent titles such as Black Rider and False Prophet.

The list already reveals a choice: songs from distant seasons share the same evening. Someone familiar with just one period of Dylan’s work may find themselves looking for the thread connecting it to the others. Some songs draw us in immediately; others ask us to listen a little longer.

It would be lovely to ask two people afterwards which moment stayed with them. They might name different songs. Or the same one, remembering a shade in the voice or a phrase that arrived at the right moment in their lives. Songs keep changing in this way too, alongside the people who encounter them.

Questions about heaven run through his records

Dylan’s musical history includes an explicitly Christian chapter, particularly evident between 1979 and 1981. Recordings from those years were revisited in Trouble No More, released in 2017. Faith entered his songs and performances with an intensity that unsettled some listeners.

Slow Train Coming appeared in 1979. It opens with Gotta Serve Somebody and includes Precious Angel, I Believe in You and When He Returns. The credits feature Mark Knopfler on guitar and a group of backing singers: their voices help shape the sound of this period.

A year later came Saved, including Pressing On and In the Garden. In 1981 he released Shot of Love, featuring Every Grain of Sand. Three albums in three years: faith occupies a definite place in his music, through singing, searching and biblical references. The notes for Saved include Jeremiah; those for Shot of Love, Matthew’s Gospel.

This offers a small path to follow even for someone who mainly knows Dylan’s biggest classics. Begin with Gotta Serve Somebody, move to the voices of Saved and arrive at Every Grain of Sand. Three listening stops to discover how much room questions about God have occupied in the artistic life of a man we still meet on stage.

Before Rome and Bologna, one whole song

The next stops bring this experience to Rome and Casalecchio di Reno. There too, filming is prohibited and phones are kept in pouches during the performance. For those who already have tickets, there is time to decide who to share the evening with and which albums to revisit before setting off.

Anyone staying home can begin with something much smaller: put on a song and listen to the end without switching windows on the screen. Then perhaps play it again. The first time you follow the rhythm; the second time a background voice emerges; the third time you notice something that had stayed hidden.

A whole song takes only a few minutes, yet we know how easily other things fill that space. Dylan gives us a good reason to leave it free. Afterwards, you can still message a friend: ‘I listened to it again. It made me think of you.’