Bob Dylan just surprise-released a 17-minute song about JFK, America, and also Freddy Krueger

Musically sparse, it’s a legitimately daunting song, as Dylan gently sings apocalyptic lyrics over a bed of strings and pianos that occasionally rise into soft crescendos, then recede. Recorded at some unspecified “a while back,” the song wanders its way through American music and atrocities in equal measure—including a namecheck of Billy Joel’s “Only The Good Die Young.” It’s the kind of song you could imagine playing over the closing montage of some great, ambitious TV show—or maybe even just the country itself, with just enough hope in Dylan’s voice to keep things from being unrelentingly bleak. The end result is simultaneously hypnotic, soothing, and little bit dire. If nothing else, it’s a reminder that the Nobel Prize-winner’s gift for crafting lyrics that tug relentlessly at the corners of your brain is still pretty firmly intact.