Bob Dylan grants interview to AARP Magazine, giving away 50,000 copies of new album to its subscribers

Q: A lot of your newer songs deal with aging. You once said that people don’t retire, they fade away, they run out of steam. And now you’re 73, you’re a great-grandfather.

A: Look, you get older. Passion is a young man’s game. Young people can be passionate. Older people gotta be more wise. I mean, you’re around awhile, you leave certain things to the young. Don’t try to act like you’re young. You could really hurt yourself.

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Q: So we at AARP represent people who are 50 and older. The magazine reaches 35 million readers.

A: Well, a lot of those readers are going to like this record. If it was up to me, I’d give you the records for nothing and you give them to every [reader of your] magazine.

Bob Dylan is on the cover of the new issue of AARP Magazine and while he’s not giving his new album Shadows in the Night (out Feb. 3) away to every reader of the magazine, he is giving 50,000 copies of them to randomly selected subscribers. What a guy! Unlike U2, he’s sending physical copies via the United States Postal Service. Maybe your grandparents got one?

It’s a rare interview (first in three years) for the press-shy Dylan, and he talks about choosing the standards to cover, and how to tackle songs that have all been sung by Frank Sinatra:

When you start doing these songs, Frank’s got to be on your mind. Because he is the mountain. That’s the mountain you have to climb, even if you only get part of the way there. And it’s hard to find a song he did not do. He’d be the guy you got to check with. People talk about Frank all the time. He had this ability to get inside of the song in a sort of a conversational way. Frank sang to you — not at you. I never wanted to be a singer that sings at somebody. I’ve always wanted to sing to somebody. I myself never bought any Frank Sinatra records back then. But you’d hear him anyway — in a car or a jukebox. Certainly nobody worshipped Sinatra in the ’60s like they did in the ’40s. But he never went away — all those other things that we thought were here to stay, they did go away. But he never did.

Read the whole interview over at AARP.