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Together Through Life: My Never Ending Tour With Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan has spent more than thirty years on the so-called Never Ending Tour, playing over 3,000 concerts all around the globe. This is the story of the ten most recent years of that tour; it is the story of Barcelona and Gothenburg, New York and Rome, Paris, Chattanooga and beyond.
Climb aboard the magic swirling ship that is Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour and follow along around Europe and America, guided by Dylan’s past and present; by the history of the places he plays in and by everyone who is traveling by your side, as well. Featuring encounters with Lana Del Rey, Tony Garnier, Don Was, Spooner Oldham and more; this is the story of what it is to be a fan on the road with the most important artist of the last 100 years.
This book will place you in the audience of Dylan’s final performance of 2011 as he traded vocals with Mark Knopfler; to the crowd in Gothenburg where his vocal renaissance shone through the rain in 2014, to the scene of the crime of his first electric gig in 1965 as he returned to Forest Hills Tennis Stadium for the first time 51 in years, has you sitting front-and-centre as he sings a one-off Standing in the Doorway in 2017 a few hours after finally picking up his Nobel Prize in Literature, leading you into the Shadow Kingdom in 2021.
You’ll be transported back to Ancient Egypt and Ancient Rome; into the Spanish and the American Civil Wars, and the streets of Minneapolis where the biggest Civil Rights Movement since the 1960s took place during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is the story of traveling on the road with Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour, yes, but it is also the story of traveling Together Through Life.
Climb aboard the magic swirling ship that is Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour and follow along around Europe and America, guided by Dylan’s past and present; by the history of the places he plays in and by everyone who is traveling by your side, as well. Featuring encounters with Lana Del Rey, Tony Garnier, Don Was, Spooner Oldham and more; this is the story of what it is to be a fan on the road with the most important artist of the last 100 years.
This book will place you in the audience of Dylan’s final performance of 2011 as he traded vocals with Mark Knopfler; to the crowd in Gothenburg where his vocal renaissance shone through the rain in 2014, to the scene of the crime of his first electric gig in 1965 as he returned to Forest Hills Tennis Stadium for the first time 51 in years, has you sitting front-and-centre as he sings a one-off Standing in the Doorway in 2017 a few hours after finally picking up his Nobel Prize in Literature, leading you into the Shadow Kingdom in 2021.
You’ll be transported back to Ancient Egypt and Ancient Rome; into the Spanish and the American Civil Wars, and the streets of Minneapolis where the biggest Civil Rights Movement since the 1960s took place during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is the story of traveling on the road with Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour, yes, but it is also the story of traveling Together Through Life.
205 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 3, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 18, 2025
Matthew Ingate has written a book that accidentally theorizes fandom as a form of labor—emotional labor, yes, but also the labor of meaning-making in a world that has strip-mined most sources of the sacred.
Together Through Life isn’t asking you to justify why someone would see Dylan 20 plus times. It’s saying: of course you would. What else are we supposed to do?
I was doing the same thing Ingate was doing—different cities, different nights, but the same irrational, glorious compulsion. Reading this felt like discovering that someone else had been keeping field notes on an expedition I thought I was taking alone. We’re roughly the same age. Sometimes he’d write about a show I’d seen days earlier, or mention passing through a city I’d just left. The uncanniness of it made me realize: we weren’t alone. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of us, treating these concerts like a mystery religion.
Ingate captures the thrill of it with the precision of someone who knows they’re experiencing something they can’t fully explain and isn’t embarrassed by that. He’s not asking you to understand. He’s not even really asking you to care about Bob Dylan. He’s saying: this thing gave my life purpose and depth, and I’m grateful, and here’s what that looked like.
The writing is clean, personal, unpretentious. This is a memoir about obsession that knows exactly what it is and refuses to apologize. Wonderful book.
Together Through Life isn’t asking you to justify why someone would see Dylan 20 plus times. It’s saying: of course you would. What else are we supposed to do?
I was doing the same thing Ingate was doing—different cities, different nights, but the same irrational, glorious compulsion. Reading this felt like discovering that someone else had been keeping field notes on an expedition I thought I was taking alone. We’re roughly the same age. Sometimes he’d write about a show I’d seen days earlier, or mention passing through a city I’d just left. The uncanniness of it made me realize: we weren’t alone. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of us, treating these concerts like a mystery religion.
Ingate captures the thrill of it with the precision of someone who knows they’re experiencing something they can’t fully explain and isn’t embarrassed by that. He’s not asking you to understand. He’s not even really asking you to care about Bob Dylan. He’s saying: this thing gave my life purpose and depth, and I’m grateful, and here’s what that looked like.
The writing is clean, personal, unpretentious. This is a memoir about obsession that knows exactly what it is and refuses to apologize. Wonderful book.
October 26, 2022
Reading this book is a bit like reading its own story, accompanied by the music of Bob Dylan. Everyone has their own experience even if in many ways we find ourselves there. Matthew's is however exceptional and we can feel a heart beating in his book, to the rhythm of Dylan's music.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews