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Bob Dylan’s ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song': Book Review

Bob Dylan offered a few thoughts on songwriting to  The New Yorker in 1964, as sessions continued for his fourth studio album,  Another Side of Bob Dylan . "Songs are so confining," the 23-year-old said. "Woody Guthrie told me once that songs don't have to rhyme – that they don't have to do anything like that. But it's not true. A song has to have some kind of form to fit into the music. You can bend the words and the meter, but it still has to fit somehow."

Even then, Dylan was considering how elements of songwriting could be combined to form a cohesive picture — and how he might be able to change, shift or sometimes do away entirely with those elements to write songs that would go on to become widely cited pillars of American music.

Now, six decades after the release of his debut album , Dylan is once again considering those elements. His newest book , The Philosophy of Modern Song , explores more than 60 tracks written and performed by other artists, ranging in style from Dean Martin's "Blue Moon" to the Clash 's "London Calling." Most of the book's tidy chapters are split in two: The first half is dedicated to describing the song's characters and storyline theatrically, while the second half focuses on the song's real-life history and the explanation for why it works. It is, in essence, the closest we may ever come to a master class on songwriting from Dylan.

Along the way, Dylan helps readers understand why a song lands emotionally and offers some insight into his background, though he warns not to conflate the two. "Knowing a singer's life story doesn't particularly help your understanding of a song," he says when writing about Elvis Costello 's "Pump It Up." "It's what a song makes you feel about your own life that's important."

Fans and journalists alike have been trying for decades to unravel the mercurial mystery that Dylan presents to the world. There aren't new answers to be found in  The Philosophy of Modern Song . Dylan comes close to addressing some of the most hotly debated topics of his career — why he changed his name, why he continues to tour — but only via the stories of others. "Like with many men who reinvent themselves, the details get a bit dodgy," he writes in the chapter on "There Stands the Glass," sung by Webb Pierce.

The clearest example of this arrives midway through the book. "People confuse tradition with calcification," Dylan writes about the Osbourne Brothers' "Ruby (Are You Mad at Your Man)." "The recording is merely a snapshot of those musicians at that moment." For those who have been puzzled by Dylan's constant reimagining of his songs, therein lies at least part of the explanation. Elsewhere, Dylan's humor shines brightly. In the chapter on Johnnie Taylor's "Cheaper to Keep Her," he discusses marriage and divorce and ends up revealing polygamist sympathies for both men and women. "Have at it, ladies," he writes. "There's another glass ceiling for you to break."

You won't learn how to become a successful composer simply by reading  The Philosophy of Modern Song . In the end, it is mainly a book designed for Dylan to discuss some of the tracks that have sparked his interest, curiosity and imagination over the years. He repeatedly implies that no official analysis of music should be taken without a grain of salt: "The argument can be made that the more you study music, the less you understand it."  The Philosophy of Modern Song , then, is remarkable not because one of the most admired artists of his generation and beyond has weighed in on the work of others but because it proves a simple fact: Dylan loves music in the same way his fans do. "Music transcends time by living within it," he writes – and what a time to be alive.

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The Philosophy of Modern Song

By Bob Dylan Simon & Schuster: 352 pages, $45 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

What should we make of the title of Bob Dylan’s new book? “ The Philosophy of Modern Song ” is a mouthful, a phrase that puts on airs. It asserts that the book is an important work, a tome that merits a place on your loftiest library shelf, up in the thin air where you keep the leather-bound, gilt-edged stuff. It has a list price worthy of an opus, $45 — pretty steep for a volume that pads out more than one-third of its pages with, per the Simon & Schuster press release, “carefully curated photographs.”

But the title is also a wisecrack, too puffed up and self-important to be taken at face value. For decades, Dylan has been laying boobytraps for his devotees, the Dylanologists who rake through his songs and scraps, seeking clues to the Riddle of Bob. The book title feels like a joke at their expense, and, maybe, a jibe at the pointy-heads in Stockholm who awarded him the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature.

In any case, “philosophy” is a useful term, vague and baggy enough to accommodate the mix of music criticism, beat poetry, wolverine snarls and Lear-on-the-heath tirades that comprise the book’s 66 chapters about 66 songs. Readers of Dylan have encountered writing in this vein before. There is the meditation on the Brecht-Weill song “ Pirate Jenny ” in his 2004 memoir “ Chronicles: Volume One ,” and the music-themed reveries scattered through his mid-’60s prose-poetry experiment “Tarantula.” The closest model may be the monologues Dylan delivered on “Theme Time Radio Hour,” the Sirius XM show he hosted from 2006 to 2009. But “The Philosophy of Modern Song” has its own wild flavor. It is — for better and, alas, worse — a special kind of bonkers.

It isn’t a book that takes time to clear its throat. Dylan offers no introduction or contextualizing chit-chat, hot-rodding straight into an essay about “ Detroit City ,” a 1963 hit by country singer Bobby Bare. “In this song you’re the Prodigal Son,” he writes. That second person pronoun is noteworthy, a key to the author’s ideas — his philosophy, if you insist — about how songs work. “Knowing a singer’s life story doesn’t particularly help your understanding of a song,” Dylan writes. “It’s what a song makes you feel about your own life that’s important.”

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That formulation could be turned in a different direction: If you know a guy’s favorite songs, you gain understanding of his life. Dylan’s playlist in “The Philosophy of Modern Song” isn’t exactly surprising, but it is revealing. There is a lot of blues and country. There’s some soul — Ray Charles, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes — and several songs by the titans of early rock & roll, including Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Little Richard , Dylan’s hero in his teenage years. Most of us fall hard for pop music as adolescents and never quite shake the stranglehold those formative hits have on our consciousness. Dylan is no different. Twenty-eight songs in the book date from the 1950s. Nine were released in 1956, the year Dylan turned 15.

He also writes about ‘60s and ‘70s rock anthems — the Who’s “ My Generation ,” the Clash’s “ London Calling ” — and makes a couple of excursions into the ‘80s catalog of Willie Nelson . But it’s clear that Dylan’s definition of “modern song” does not extend into the hip-hop era. He mentions Run-DMC, the Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z but doesn’t delve into the music. The most recent recording he considers, from 2004, is a rendition of a Stephen Foster song that was composed in 1849.

Some of the book’s most passionate passages concern the songbook of Dylan’s parents’ generation, hits crooned by the vocal stars of the pre-rock era. Dylan did as much as anybody to dislodge that music from the center of American life, but in the last two decades he has reclaimed and recontextualized it. On albums like “Love and Theft” (2001), “ Modern Times ” (2006) and his recent sequence of Sinatra tribute records, Dylan sounds like a grizzled version of a ‘30s balladeer. Those recordings make a case against folk purism, arguing that the old pop standards are as powerful and mysterious any as any field holler or singer-songwriter’s confession. In a chapter about Perry Como’s 1951 recording of the Tin Pan Alley warhorse “ Without a Song ,” Dylan hails Como, often dismissed as milquetoast, and champions musical interpretation over auteurism: “Perry Como lived in every moment of every song he sang. He didn’t have to write a song to do it. … What more could you want from an artist?”

As a work of prose, “The Philosophy of Modern Song” is relentless. It rip-snorts along, charging from song to song, idea to idea. Dylan can write what journalists call a great lede: a first sentence that detonates like a hand grenade. “This song speaks New Speak.” “This song is the grinning skull.” “In this song the fire’s gone out and your life is missing.” Sometimes, he renders straightforward judgments, weighing the beauty of “Blue Moon” with its “melody right out of Debussy” or exulting in Hank Williams’ “ Your Cheatin’ Heart ,” a song that is “perfectly played and sung … with the exact correct intensity.” Hints of professional rivalry and one-upmanship creep in. In a chapter on Elvis Costello’s “ Pump It Up ,” Dylan correctly notes the song’s debt to his own “ Subterranean Homesick Blues ” and delivers a sly double-diss, aimed at Costello and another rock star: “At the point of ‘Pump It Up,’ [Costello] obviously had been listening to Springsteen too much.”

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More often, though, Dylan is in a different dimension altogether, cruising the space-scape of his imagination. For Dylan, songs aren’t just artworks to be analyzed and explicated; they’re visions that beget visions, prompts for his own madcap and macabre yarn-spinning. His essay on the Temptations’ “ Ball of Confusion ” paints scenes of societal collapse: “Blood running in the streets, earthquakes on the next block, women getting raped on the corner, spaceships taking off. Nothing fastened down.” The entry on Uncle Dave Macon’s “ Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy ” (1924) is an extended culinary riff, a metaphor that keeps mutating until it’s ordered everything on the menu:

“You’re Long John Silver and you’ve got snakes in your boots, fortune cookies and glazed donuts, and you’re drinking iced coffee — eating dried beef and picnic ham, swallowing whole mouthfuls of Boston cream pie. … This song melts everything down, browns it up and deep fries it — it’ll milk the cow till it gives blood.”

What does all this add up to? Not quite a philosophy of modern song, or at least not a coherent one. But coherence isn’t what you want from Bob Dylan. What you want is to watch songs ping-pong around his brain; you want a close encounter with his mind. Unfortunately, that same mind is the storehouse for some extremely dark and disturbing ideas about — to use the retrograde term that Dylan himself employs — the opposite sex.

You have to plow through 46 chapters before encountering a song by a female artist. (Cher’s “ Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves .”) There are only four songs by women in the book. That’s Dylan’s prerogative, of course; he’s writing about his record collection, not mine or yours. Yet women loom large in his consciousness and are omnipresent in his pages — appearing in such monstrous form, evoked in language so marinated in misogyny, that, reading “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” I began to feel like a therapist, sneaking glances at my watch while the crackpot on the couch blurts one creepy fantasy after another.

The women we meet in Dylan’s essays include a “she goat,” a “crazy bitch,” a “gold digging showgirl, full skirted in a cocktail dress” and a “hot-blooded sex starved wench.” Dylan describes women as “pug-nosed, grim faced and short on looks,” “bare breasted, blue veined — short, powerful, and ugly” and “foul-tasting.” Sometimes Dylan sounds like a garden-variety sexist jerk. (“Her voice gets on your nerves — the low drone, the squeaking sounds.”) But he also spews bile from the murkiest depths of the male id. He refers to the labia majora as a “steel trap.” He writes of a woman who “feeds on the entrails of your victims, and if you pull back her skin, you’ll see the head of an animal.”

In a ‘radical’ choice, Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize in literature

Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley Speaking to some French girl Who says she knows me well He was the kid on the coffee house stage growling out songs from behind a guitar that seemed to weigh more than he did.

Dylan’s essay on the Eagles’ “ Witchy Woman ” occasions a rant about “The woman from the global village of nowhere — destroyer of cultures, traditions, identities, and deities.” Elsewhere he gives voice to what can only be called a psychosexual murder fantasy: “You want to maim and mangle her. You want to see her in agony, and you want to blow this whole thing up until it’s swollen, where you’ll run your hands all over and squeeze it till it collapses.”

Then there’s the chapter on Johnnie Taylor’s “ Cheaper to Keep Her ,” a funny soul-blues song about divorce that sends Dylan into a diatribe about polygamy: “It’s nobody’s business how many wives a man has. … But the screws already get tightened from all sides — women’s rights crusaders and women’s lib lobbyists take turns putting man back on his heels until he is pinned behind the eight ball dodging the shrapnel from the glass ceiling. … What downtrodden woman with no future, battered around by the whims of a cruel society, wouldn’t be better off as one of a rich man’s wives — taken care of properly, rather than friendless on the street depending on government stamps?”

It’s a bummer, to put it mildly, to find a Nobel laureate — and, more to the point, the writer of “ Tangled up in Blue ” — mixing metaphors and spouting nonsense like an elderly uncle who bulk-emails links to Fox News segments. In one of “The Philosophy of Modern Song’s” pithier moments, Dylan makes the obvious but important point that pop lyrics, which may “seem so slight” when read, are “written for the ear and not for the eye.” It’s when those words are set to music and dramatized by a singer of skill and sympathy that the magical transmutation occurs.

Dylan is a brilliant songwriter, of course; the truth is, he’s a better singer, a master vocal stylist whose performances speak to the deeps of human emotion even when they carry unseemly attitudes and ideas. But when his words just sit there, between hardcovers on a stark white page, their discordant notes are hard to bear.

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Bob Dylan’s First Book Since Winning the Nobel Is by Turns Brilliant, Nonsensical, and Misogynistic

The philosophy of modern song will bedazzle and befuddle, not to mention troll..

He might be the single most written-about musician in the history of popular music, but Bob Dylan has long had a sideline as a sort of music critic himself. The opening of his first book, 1971’s Tarantula , a collection of Beat prose-poetry rambles, is about Aretha Franklin: “aretha/ crystal jukebox queen of hymn & him diffused in drunk transfusion wound.” Then there was his so-called memoir, 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One — there’s been no sign of a volume two. It’s an enthralling farrago of fabrications and tangents that occasionally, when it circles back to his early life on the Greenwich Village folk scene, offers rare bits of vivid personal disclosure, including meditations on artists and songs that helped shape him.

Dylan has also talked cryptically, crankily, but eloquently about music in many interviews and speeches, on his 2006–09 satellite radio show Theme Time Radio Hour , and in the liner notes to his albums, particularly his 1993 folk and blues covers album World Gone Wrong . His songs themselves are often glosses on the warehouse of music in his head, as on his nearly 17-minute 2020 single “ Murder Most Foul ”—improbably the sole Dylan song ever to top a Billboard chart—which begins as an invocation of Jack Kennedy’s assassination and metamorphosizes into a metaphysical DJ set that name-checks some 74 songs and artists .

Now, almost exactly 18 years after Chronicles , he’s gone all the way with his new The Philosophy of Modern Song , an entire tome of wild, erratic writing about music that is sure to bedazzle and befuddle. It consists of 66 short essays on specific songs—or, rather significantly, specific recordings . As he writes in the chapter about Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou”: “Sometimes songs can be slippery in the studio—they can go right through your fingers. Some of our favorite records are mediocre songs at best that somehow came alive when the tape was running.”

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Why did Dylan decide to write it? Who knows. There’s no introduction to elucidate. The book is dedicated to the late songwriter Doc Pomus but also offers special thanks to “all the crew at Dunkin’ Donuts.” Maybe it’s just being 81 and keen to pontificate. Maybe it’s a shadow rebuttal to those who sneered at his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016 .

Dylan’s Nobel obviously wasn’t for his books. He’s probably the only laureate who, in any given year, is the subject of more published volumes than he’s ever penned. Without music, his quicksilver collages of imagery, narrative, rhetoric, and wisecrack are far more prone to come off as bullshit. As a listener, I don’t care that the real-life Dylan is probably kind of a dick . As a reader, it is harder to overlook.

I’d still advise Dylan fans and the Bob-curious to jump on this bumpy ride. This is Dylan in crate-digging mode, curating material that he’s repurposed and rung his changes on over the decades, much like a rapper rhyming over a funk sample. In David Remnick’s New Yorker piece last week about Dylan , Remnick quotes the singer, from a 2004 interview with the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn , explaining how he writes songs by “playing” old tunes obsessively in his head until they transmogrify into something new. Most chapters here unfold in two parts, an initial discourse in which Dylan riffs on what the song is about, and then a sidebar of sorts on the record’s background, artist, or other related themes. In the book’s best riff sections, you nearly witness that songwriting process in action.

Take the one on Carl Perkins’ version of “Blue Suede Shoes,” which builds hilariously to the point where the titular footwear is like a holy grail: “These shoes are not like other shifty things that perish or change or transform themselves. They symbolize church and state, and have the substance of the universe in them. … They neither move nor speak, yet they vibrate with life, and contain the infinite power of the sun.” In the more prosaic sidebar, Dylan observes that suede shoes were the kind of luxury a poor person could afford: “Has any article of clothing ever said more plainly that it wasn’t meant for the farm, that it wasn’t made to step in pig shit?” However, he notes, Perkins was too much of a bumpkin to make the impact on rock ’n’ roll that the more urban “feral whiff” of Elvis Presley did: “Carl wrote this song, but if Elvis was alive today, he’d be the one to have a deal with Nike.”

In the case of Presley’s own “Money Honey,” on the other hand, skip past the riff to the sidebar, which opens with the sharp proposition “Art is a disagreement. Money is an agreement.” Dylan goes on: “That’s why there can be no such thing as a national art form. In the attempt, we can feel the sanding of the edges, the endeavor to include all opinions, the hope not to offend.” Given Dylan’s record of copy-and-pasting lines he’s picked up elsewhere into his songs and prose alike, some of that (or anything else in the book) may be pilfered, but if so, it’s well stolen.

At the least, the book makes for a hell of a mixtape. Within its limits, that is. Across picks from 1924 to 2003, but dominated by the 1950s of his youth, there’s lots of country, blues, soul, rock, and crooner pop, and a couple of nods to punk (Elvis Costello and the Clash). Jazz is absent, despite Dylan’s professed love of Miles Davis. There’s also no rap, a form Dylan influenced via the likes of Gil Scott-Heron, and one whose tumbling verbiage he ought to appreciate. Instead, his passing references are dismissive.

It gets worse. Dylan frequently goes off on old-man rants about the supposed shallowness of culture today compared with the good old days of his youth. Over and over, he repulsively characterizes women as vixens, bloodsuckers, or just plain shrews. You might argue he’s channeling the songs he’s writing about—the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman,” for instance, but why is that crap song in here, anyway? Elsewhere he’s surely trolling, as he always has: for example, when he caps a diatribe of bitterness about divorce lawyers prompted by Johnnie Taylor’s “Cheaper to Keep Her” by advocating polygamy as an alternative. But he focuses on records by women in a paltry four of these 66 chapters—no Aretha here—and when he does admit them, it’s usually to woolgather about some other theme rather than to consider the artists themselves, as he does with so many of the men. He says next to nothing about Nina Simone’s performance of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” preferring to complain vaguely about his own disgruntlement at being misconstrued.

Some of those aspects are predictable if you’ve heard, say, “ Just Like a Woman .” But they are symptoms of the book’s indulgences. Half the time, one part of each chapter, usually the riff, could have been excised. Some of them launch from the song into intoxicating Dylanesque dreams reminiscent of the experimentalism of Tarantula , but others redundantly paraphrase the lyrical content of the song itself or repeat tricks we’ve seen just a few pages earlier—most often far-out apocalyptic hyperbole. It’s one thing to claim that Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” is “a song of genocide, where you’re led by your nose into a nuclear war, ground zero, New Mexico where the first atom bomb was tested. Land of witchcraft, Crazy Cat Mountain, and the El Paso gate of death.” It’s another to say, “This is the song of the deviant, the pedophile, the mass murderer,” when you are talking about “Come On-a My House” by Rosemary Clooney. The effect, no matter whether poetical or comical, wears as thin as a Hermann Hesse paperback in the rear pocket of an old hippie’s Levis.

Judicious cuts would have made this handsome coffee-table consumer item feel less substantial—it’s also full of period photos and pictures that, uncaptioned, act less as illustrations than historical montage-style allusions. But the verbal padding makes it boring to read straight through; I’d recommend skimming and dipping over an extended time.

Insights into Dylan’s own artistry are here, but they’re camouflaged or winked at. He never mentions when a song is one he’s performed himself in the past, such as “Jesse James” or Tommy Edwards’ “It’s All in the Game.”  It’s amusing when Dylan trashes the Who’s “My Generation” for its youthful arrogance, knowing that he’s the one who wrote the generational call to arms “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” And in the chapter on Judy Garland’s version of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “Come Rain or Come Shine,” he writes, “During the sixties, it was popular for self-important scene-makers to belittle so-called Tin Pan Alley hacks. … As is often the case, the facile got lumped in with the truly talented.” Dylan was, of course, one of those self-important scenesters. In the past decade, he’s recorded three full albums of Tin Pan Alley standards , but in 1963, on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan , he drawled: “Unlike most of the songs nowadays that have been written up in Tin Pan Alley … this was written somewhere down in the United States.” Even in 1984, he proclaimed: “Tin Pan Alley is gone. I put an end to it. People can record their own songs now.” But there’s never been any reward in calling Dylan on his contradictions. As he quoted Walt Whitman on his latest studio album , “I contain multitudes.”

Often, the closest he gets to self-revelation is talking about that fluidity. In the chapter on his buddy Johnny Cash’s “Big River,” he begins, “Well-meaning people can suffocate you with praise.” He grouses about how Cash’s late-career American Recordings series, produced by Rick Rubin, led to Cash being reduced to his stark “Man in Black” persona, to the exclusion of his humor and generosity. Dylan more than sympathizes. And in the closing chapter on Dion, Dylan writes about that singer’s self-reinventions across decades, offering his own manifesto: “The profanity, the shallowness, being born—reborn and born again, the regeneration of it all. That’s the ultimate aim.”

I wish there were far more here about his understanding of craft. It’s refreshing when he writes about Bobby Darin’s or Hank Williams’ phrasing or the arrangement of the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion.” My Fair Lady ’s “On the Street Where You Live,” he notices, is “all about the three-syllable rhyme.” That’s a far cry better than his claim in the riff part that this swoony Broadway ballad is about how “you fell for the foxy harlot.”

As a writer about music, Dylan’s strengths are his sensitivities to history and musical technique. His weaknesses feel like bad imitations of some of his own finest critics. Chiefly Greil Marcus, who has written more and better about Dylan than just about anyone , most recently in Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs , which came out last month. Marcus’ stylistic traits jump out from Dylan’s riff sections: an imperious second person that assumes that how “you” experience a song is universal rather than particular, the way his metaphors spiral by stages up to existential extremes, the recasting of mundane lyrics as surreal archetypes out of hidden and forgotten pasts.

The Philosophy of Modern Song

By Bob Dylan. Simon & Schuster.

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Anyone thinking Philosophy proves that Dylan can out-critic his critics should go read Folk Music . Calling that book a biography is itself a Dylanesque joke, and it is far from Marcus’ best about Dylan (that’s probably still The Old, Weird America ). But Marcus’ erudition and lateral-thinking acrobatics are evident as Folk Music navigates, for instance, the space between 1964’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’ ” and 2000’s “Things Have Changed.” Or when it investigates the possible link between the “Desolation Row” line “They’re selling postcards of the hanging” and a 1920 lynching in Minnesota that Dylan’s father could conceivably have attended as a child. Dylan’s speculative leaps in his own book are, in comparison, rank amateurism. Yet Marcus’ methods and style must partly derive in the first place from the model of Dylan lyrics. Dylan’s music, in turn, incorporates, answers, and resists such analyses. Their dialogue plays out one possible ideal of the symbiotic dynamic between art and criticism as creative forms.

In his introduction to Folk Music, Marcus writes, “The engine of [Dylan’s] songs is empathy: the desire and the ability to enter other lives, even to restage and re-enact the dramas others have played out, in search of different endings.” Maybe, but empathy is not the word I’d use. It feels suited to a more humanist Dylan successor such as John Prine , mentioned but not singled out in The Philosophy of Modern Song . Dylan’s gift is more the “negative capability” John Keats found in Shakespeare. With his seemingly detached relationship to his own selfhood, Dylan flagrantly traverses boundaries other people might back away from. It’s as much the realm of the con artist as of the empath. It’s the trickster cool that lets him write a book as unhinged as this one with some semblance of a straight face, and makes so many of us eager to follow along, whatever our better instincts, to flirt with how it might feel to be so unnervingly free.

Bob Dylan on the Songs That Captivate and Define Us

In his first collection of writing since “Chronicles: Volume One,” Dylan explores the lasting allure of great songs. Here are two excerpts from his new book.

Bob Dylan released 39 studio albums and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. He is the author of the memoir “Chronicles: Volume One.” Credit... William C. Eckenberg/The New York Times

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The title of Bob Dylan’s latest book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” is, in a sense, misleading. A collection of brief essays on 65 songs (and one poem), it is less a rigorous study of craft than a series of rhapsodic observations on what gives great songs their power to fascinate us.

Dylan, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, worked on these for more than a decade, though they flow more like extemporaneous sermons. The chapter on Johnnie Taylor’s “Cheaper to Keep Her,” for example, is mainly an indictment of the lawyers whose profiteering of heartbreak drives the divorce “industry.”

Elsewhere, Dylan writes in oracular riddles. His one-paragraph piece on “Long Tall Sally,” by Little Richard, likens Sally to the Nephilim giants of the Old Testament, and postulates Richard as “a giant of a different kind” who took a diminutive stage name “so as not to scare anybody.”

About half the essays in the book — his first collection of new writing since “Chronicles: Volume One,” in 2004 — are accompanied by what Dylan’s publisher calls “riffs”: even shorter, even looser pieces, in which Dylan attempts to embody the spirit — the philosophy? — of the song itself. On “Poor Little Fool,” by Ricky Nelson: “She sized you up, she was captivating and shrewd and lousy with lies. Oh yeah, you were an absolute blockhead beyond a doubt.”

In these excerpts, each featuring an essay and a “riff,” (presented in italics below), Dylan looks at songs that represented two poles of mid-1960s culture. He locates the paradox within the Who’s “My Generation” as youth’s dread of becoming what it most detests: old. Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” on the other hand, is a glimpse of “tramps and mavericks” hooking up in the twilight of the “Mad Men” age — though Dylan, ever unpredictably, devotes most of his ink to an apocryphal claim about the song’s authorship.

Students of Dylan have long known to just listen and not ask why. — Ben Sisario

Strangers in the Night, by Frank Sinatra

Music by bert kaempfert. lyrics by charles singleton and eddie snyder.

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REVIEW OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG

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Bob Dylan. The Philosophy of Modern Song . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022. 352pp.

REVIEW BY Jonathan Hodgers, Trinity College, Dublin

Dylan’s long-awaited Philosophy of Modern Song defies easy categorization. It’s sixtysix mini-essays on sixty-six songs. Pictures account for much of the content. Despite the title, it is not always a straightforward work of philosophy. If anything, it’s an annotated playlist dotted with philosophical reflections. However, the term playlist doesn’t do the book justice given how elaborate (or tangential) the annotations are. It’s also unclear how essential some of the songs are to the essays. They’re apt to work as jumping-off points for exploring a given subject matter and are not there as simple recommendations.

The book’s unusual presentation finds parallels in the content. There’s no introduction or conclusion, omitting an explanation of the book’s raison d’être . In the interview conducted by Jeff Slate for the Wall Street Journal on the topic of the book, Dylan doesn’t address the book’s inspiration or how he picked the songs.[1] While the content can range widely, the essays follow a template of sorts. He will paraphrase the song’s plot and character dynamics, offer portraits of singers, describe particular performances, and reflect on musicological details or production qualities. He might also extemporize on the song’s themes. Different combinations thereof are regular. He juxtaposes the essays with images. Dylan calls them “running mates to the text.”[2] Sometimes, their connection is oblique. Other times, the images reflect the essays’ topics (the verbal/visual interplay is delightfully basic at times – actual eagles for the Eagles, for instance). The template helps keep the chapters fresh by balancing consistency within variation (not unlike aspects of the songs he praises). It’s not an especially formalist text, which may partly be the point. He heavily emphasizes music’s emotive impact. However, songwriting’s more technical aspects do occasionally come under the microscope.

The writing itself has a distinct style. The tone is erudite but not alienating. It bears comparison to the World Gone Wrong liner notes, but adapts a cleaner, more prosaic approach fit for broader public consumption. At times, it can be blustery or gushing (the Perry Como entry: “[he] could out-sing anybody. His performance is just downright incredible. There is nothing small you can say about it. The orchestration alone can knock you off your feet.”)[3] It can be prolix and prosaic, as with the “‘My Generation” entry: “They don’t like you because you pull out all the stops and go for broke. You put your heart and soul into everything and shoot the works.”[4] It’s vernacular, willfully leaning into cliché. He’s apparently having fun with the clichés too; his stitching them together has its own comedy value (“It’s just a hop skip and jump to cloud nine.”)[5] What they lack in inventiveness or precision, they make up for in tone. It’s the way one might pitch a song or singer to a friend – it’s not all terse, calculated soundbites but draws from common stock locutions that convey unpremeditated enthusiasm. Comma splices, tautologies, and repetitions add to the effect. (These techniques seem to work better when spoken aloud, as attested to by the couple of passages Dylan recorded for the audiobook.) He’ll also link clichés and round them off with a more unusual turn of phrase (“You’re tickled pink and walking on air, and there’s no end to space.”)[6]The blend of the familiar and the individual may be the point in some way. This tendency extends to the content. The combination of esoterica and unusual locutions with more conventional, encyclopaedic information gives the writing its richness (or, as he told Jeff Slate, the “pulling old elements together and making something new”).[7]

Despite the essays mostly adhering to a similar structural outline, there are qualitative and quantitative differences between them. Some songs inspire more fleshed-out ideas and insightful commentary than others. It’s curious what songs defeat him. He can’t seem to do much with the two Little Richard songs (“Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally”) but is clearly taken with “Old Violin” – or specifically, a special live performance enriched by Johnny Paycheck’s presence – which inspires some of the book’s best writing. He highlights both physical gestures and vocal touches that capture the bottled lightening of the performance, conferring upon it a fated quality. Perhaps his commentary succeeds here owing to its audio-visual reference point; his writing magnifies objective features rather than offering subjective impressions. As vivid as Dylan’s more subjective paraphrases can be, his readings sometimes seem off. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” doesn’t work well. Dylan rather perversely sidesteps the obvious romantic dynamic and substitutes it for a less convincing business arrangement. The “Come On-A My House” essay aims to give the song a sinister touch, but it’s just not there, at least not in the Rosemary Clooney rendition. Mostly though, his writing offers evocative vignettes that tease out the song’s depths and elucidate the musicians’ contributions in perceptive ways.

Dylan appears to use these songs to declare allegiances with certain genres quite separate from actually liking the representative song he’s chosen to write about. Something about these songs moved him to write about them, but that’s not to say they’re strictly commendable. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe he finds anything of genuine interest (such as with “Come On-A My House” – in keeping with the food references, he calls it a “little trifle.”)[8] However, it’s not so much his sincerity that matters (“I’m no more sincere than you” from Eat the Document springs to mind), more whether he sells these songs as having the qualities and values he ascribes to them. People’s tolerance levels will differ here. It’s unlikely anyone ever thought of Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” the way Dylan does, but he certainly presents an interesting case.

Gradations of rock ’n’ roll, blues, country, and Tin Pan Alley material spur most of the essays. Dylan omits much of the traditional material he made his name covering and adapting in the 1960s (“Jesse James” is the only representative). Perhaps unsurprisingly, he doesn’t care for pop (loosely defined). In reference to Johnnie Ray, Dylan says “his feelings were too direct-hotwired from his brain for a mere pop record.”[9] The term “mere” also appears in the “My Prayer” essay [10] He never makes clear what pop is (certainly, some of the songs he includes were emphatically popular and chart-friendly), yet he’s far from alone in using it as a catch-all term for songs considered inferior. Simon Frith identifies pop as a “residual” category, or “what’s left when all the other forms of popular music are stripped away.” Among other things, “It’s music produced commercially, for profit, as a matter of enterprise not art.”[11] Dylan’s idea of it seems similar.

The way Dylan uses pop exemplifies how he uses contrasts in general to illustrate good-versus-bad performance practices and attitudes. Part of Dylan’s modus operandi is to make antagonists of certain musicians and styles against which good songs and musicians must win out. In the “Your Cheatin’ Heart” essay, Joe Satriani (representing instrumental rock) stands in for guitar pyrotechnics without substance or respect for the song. Satriani is a virtuoso player but can of course play tastefully and judiciously. Satriani defended himself (“I think the great Hank Williams and I could have sorted things out and made some great music together”),[12] but these references have less to do with personal slights than venerating and denigrating types of songs and styles through loose metonymy. Satriani’s not alone either; Dylan does the same with Springsteen and the Beatles. Springsteen’s characteristic sound clouds Costello’s “Pump it Up,” for instance, while the Beatles’ faux-naivete and adolescent appeal contrast poorly with “London Calling.” The entire Chess stable (among them, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and Howlin’ Wolf) takes a hit next to Little Walter, who “might have been the only one with real substance.”[13] These performers and styles play oppositional parts, indicating predilections that Dylan portrays as lesser next to the songs, styles, and musicians he promotes. Such artists are collateral damage in Dylan’s dispensing praise.

This praise is where we often find the most philosophical material. While they don’t occupy the bulk of the book, there are philosophical precepts insofar as Dylan draws general principles from specific songs. Many qualities that he esteems are aesthetic evergreens. Lewis Rowell provides a summary in the context of Ancient Greek music philosophy: “simple is better than complex, natural is better than artificial, [and] moderation in all things.”[14] The “Without a Song” essay touches on these facets in reference to Perry Como: “He was a Cadillac before the tail fins; a Colt .45, not a Glock; steak and potatoes, not California cuisine … No artifice, no forcing one syllable to spread itself thin across many notes.” Regarding “Take Me from This Garden of Evil,” Dylan says: “Nothing artificial about this song, nothing manufactured or contrived about it. Nothing cosmetic or plastic here.” He also writes that “Key to the Highway” is “Unadorned, with no histrionics – controlled, nuanced and true.”[15] Given his apparent interest in Greek myth and literature, it’s perhaps telling that Dylan’s criteria have an overall classical inclination. In the “Doesn’t Hurt Anymore” essay, he offers a tell-tale sign: “He’s no rapper. More like an ancient Greek poet; you know exactly what he’s saying and who he’s saying it to.”[16]

Other entries praise judiciousness, balance, and brevity. In the “Your Cheatin’ Heart” essay, he tells us that “The fiddle and steel guitar phrases are a great part of the melody. Each phrase goes hand in hand with the voice. This … takes simpatico players and is done with very simple notes of a chord, played with the exact correct intensity… Phrases like this are worth more than all the technical licks in the world.”[17] Alongside this dig at perceived immoderation and showiness, one can detect a distrust of the glossy professional and respect for the street-schooled amateur. Aristotle would recognize Dylan’s attitude. In referring to music’s role in education, he avers that “pupils … not [be] made to attempt the extraordinary and extravagant feats of execution which have recently been introduced into competitions … Performances should be carried only to the point at which students begin to be able to appreciate good melodies and rhythms.”[18]

À la Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, Dylan also praises the permanent and lasting. What counts is what’s durable. For “Ball of Confusion,” he writes: “The reality of this song is that it’s just as true now as the day it was recorded.”[19] It also crops up in the “Black Magic Woman” chapter; those too in thrall to musical and literary rules “run the danger of never transcending craft to create anything truly lasting.”[20] He’s more explicit in the Wall Street Journal interview: “A great song [is] timeless and ageless.”21 This mindset even extends to his pastimes. He tells Jeff Slate that boxing is “functional and detached from trends.”[22]

As familiar as some of his judgments are from historical literature on music, he brings a host of newer parameters into his critique. Some are recognizable from popular music aesthetics in the rock era and in part stem from standards he himself helped to set. Broadly, we can see Dylan align with what Keir Keightley would see as Romantic authenticity, gravitating towards: “tradition and continuity with the past; roots; sense of community; populism; belief in a core or essential rock sound; folk, blues, country, rock’n’roll styles; gradual stylistic change; sincerity, directness; ‘liveness’; ‘natural’ sounds; [and] hiding musical technology.”[23] Dylan touches on these qualities in his interview with Jeff Slate: “[The songs] were straightforward, and my relationship to them at first was external, then became personal and intense. The songs were simple, easy to understand, and they’d come to you in a direct way.”[24] While his allegiances roughly lie with these Romantic precepts, Dylan does not always fit into them neatly. Individual songs capture his attention based on different criteria (what Keightley would see as modernist authenticity, indicated by a fondness for experimentation and progress). Novelty for its own sake doesn’t impress Dylan, but innovative, trailblazing songs like “Tutti Frutti” and “My Generation” are not overlooked.

Relatedly, mavericks operating within, outside, or against the mainstream garner his sympathy. The criteria are expressed neatly in the “Poison Love” entry when Dylan refers to Johnnie & Jack: “They deserve to be in all the halls of fame, because they are innovators – innovators on the highest level – and don’t jump through hoops for anybody.”[25] In this context, unpretentious journeymen also fare well; as already noted, Dylan writes admiringly of Perry Como, but Bobby Darin too earns his praise. Believability counts for a great deal. We’re told that “When [Como] stood and sang, he owned the song and he shared it and we believed every single word. What more could you want from an artist?”[26] Indeed, believing the singer (over and above adherence to technical norms or conventionally pretty vocals) is part of Dylan’s influence – practically a testament to his own achievements. This leads us to a peculiar quality of the text: its autobiographical quality.

At times, his takes on songs and performers resonate with Dylan’s history. One can see parallels between the people he writes about and Dylan’s own life, as if he were explaining himself through analogous individuals. A reflection on Nuta Kotlyarenko in the “There Stands the Glass” essay offers tantalizing parallels with Dylan. Dylan’s version of Kotlyarenko’s biography practically remixes details from his own: Ukrainian Jewish ancestry; “trying his hand at boxing and acting”; moving from Minnesota to New York; and reinventing oneself.[27] Dylan essentially talks about himself at times; musing on Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea,” he tells us that “Some people create new lives to hide their past. Bobby knew that sometimes the past was nothing more than an illusion and you might just as well keep making stuff up.”[28] Even the name doesn’t need to be changed. He also writes about Johnny Paycheck’s name change in ways that clearly resonate with his own re-branding from Zimmerman to Dylan. In telling us about laudable songwriting, he additionally highlights other writers’ approaches that contextualise his own. In the “Ruby, Are You Mad?” essay, he tells us how “the song morphed and grew … It was still the same song but the tiny grace notes and elasticity kept it alive, shook the dust from its boots. Of course, some people cried foul and those people should’ve stayed home.” Also, in reference to Dion, he says that “Most recently, he has realized one of his early dreams and become some kind of elder legend, a bluesman from another Delta.”[29] One can read a multitude of Dylan’s own experiences into these comments.

While Dylan broadly cleaves to Romantic authenticity as his yardstick, he is still apt to admire songs for contrasting reasons. He regularly praises the flexible and mutable. He appears to favour what Stephen Davies terms ontologically “thin” pieces. Thinner works facilitate more interpretation. Greater latitude is granted to the performer (within certain stylistic constraints).[30] “Thicker” works (for example, a significant amount of classical music) require greater fidelity to specifics, where new interpretations have much in common with earlier iterations. He appears to gravitate to both songs’ and artists’ adaptability: “Bobby Darin could sound like anybody and sing any style”; “[Little Walter] is an amazingly flexible singer”; and “The malleability of [‘Blue Moon’] frees it from being too associated with any single version and allows it to belong to everyone.”[31] He also touches on this in the Wall Street Journal interview: ‘A great song … can be played with a full orchestra score or by a strolling minstrel… A great song mutates, makes quantum leaps … It crosses genres … and can be played in …multiple styles.”[32]

He appears to trust less those “thick” songs too in thrall to arrangements. In the “Blue Moon” essay, he avers that “Some songs, like … ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ … are as dependent on their arrangement as the music or lyrics for their identity. Not so ‘Blue Moon.’ ‘Blue Moon’ is a universal song that can appeal to anybody at any time.”[33] While I’m not sure this is meant pejoratively, one still senses a hint of distaste in context.[34] That being said, Dylan will promote the arrangement as the magic ingredient in a song. He tells us that for “It’s All in The Game,” “the arrangement is key.”[35] This is to say he’s not especially prescriptive. Qualities that get in the way in one song are precisely what another song thrives on.

Dylan also occasionally highlights songwriting techniques; for instance, he appreciates paradox. He unearths unspoken undertows that deepen the song’s meaning. As Cleanth Brooks illuminated in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947), the guise of simplicity or the direct attack (Brooks uses Wordsworth as an example) belies paradoxical situations that give ostensibly straightforward material extra resonance. Dylan astutely draws from The Who’s “My Generation” an anxiety on Townsend’s part that he will soon be the one the younger generation wishes would fade away. That awareness cannot be traced to any specific point in the song or line of the lyrics. Yet, the implicit fear can be intuited through a latent defensiveness. Dylan finds an analogous undertow to “Detroit City.”

Dylan wishes to preserve the capacity for people’s imagination to complete the song rather than have external imagery unduly influence their experience. He considers the background to “I’m A Fool to Want You” to be unhelpful trivia when “It’s what a song makes you feel about your own life that’s important.”[36] In the “Ball of Confusion” essay, he tells us “The song is like an old radio show, where you could just imagine what you’re listening to. And it made for a stronger experience.”[37] In the “Old Violin” essay, he references how the story behind “Save the Last Dance for Me” provides too many specifics that interfere with how the song resonates with an individual. He criticizes music videos for the same reason (“we are locked into someone else’s messaging of the lyrics.”)[38] He prizes imagination when it comes to songwriting too; in the Wall Street Journal piece, he attests that “Creative ability is about pulling old elements together and making something new, and I don’t believe silicon chips and passwords know anything about those elements, or where they are. You have to have a vivid imagination.”[39] Relatedly, one can detect hostility to anything too systematized or scientific. In the “Black Magic Woman” essay, he mentions that “What happens with words and music is more akin to alchemy … People can keep trying to turn music into a science, but in science one and one will always be two. Music … tells us time and again that one plus one, in the best circumstances, equals three.”[40] At times, he sounds like another philosopher with a distaste for a scientific approach to music: Jean Jacques Rousseau (from Rousseau’s “On the Principle of Melody”: “Let us … not think that the empire Music has over our passions is ever explained by proportions and numbers”).[41]

Dylan also has techniques for how he approaches his essays. The more informative sections can give way to speculations on alternative histories. He finds musing on these what-ifs edifying; it’s not at all incongruous with No Direction Home ’s “I want a dog that’s going to collect and clean my bath!” (2005) or, more recently, his concoctions in “My Own Version of You” from Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). In writing about pop music history, Gilbert Rodman points out that “one of the most difficult tricks in doing historical work is recapturing the sense of uncertainty that existed at some prior moment about what would happen next.”[42] Inevitability applied ex post facto has a way of drying up and ossifying the telling of history; instead, the trick is to imbue old facts with a sense of surprise and discovery by taking away that retrospective inevitability and restoring a feeling of uncertainty as to how history might unfold. In this manner, Dylan likes to upend inevitabilities by highlighting alternatives: “You have to wonder, what if Sam had sent Elvis over to Luther’s house instead of to Scotty Moore’s? Scotty and Bill would then have been backing up Johnny Cash, and Luther and Marshall Grant would have been playing with Elvis.”[43] More what-ifs include his speculations on Ricky Nelson’s lost acting opportunities in the “Poor Little Fool” essay. He also mentions alternative stories within the songs themselves, as with “Pancho and Lefty” (“In another life Pancho would’ve been in the bullring and Lefty on the Ryman country music stage.”)[44]

To close: there’s no shortage of work to be done linking The Philosophy of Modern Song up with Dylan’s previous pronouncements on musical aesthetics, but also the wider firmament of musical philosophy in general (at times, it seems as if Dylan has set up his essays to be purposely anti-Adorno – in praising “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy,” he attests that “it follows no line, and one part can easily be replaced by another part.”)[45] And Dylan is engaged in philosophy here, insofar as he’s doing what Sharpe views as part of analytical philosophy: “making us reflect upon unconsidered presuppositions; [which] may lead us to reflect on our lives and our values and cause us either to value things differently or perhaps more directly to alter our conduct.”[46] Dylan throwing his weight behind these criteria counts, in other words, if, by doing so, he steers songwriters and critics towards them and away from others. From his observations, Dylan infers broader principles, suggests evaluative standards, and posits aesthetic verities. Quite apart from promoting any individual work, the book also venerates the medium of song and its ability to enrich our emotional lives through the deep, personal connections we form with their worldviews and sensibilities.

[1] Jeff Slate, ‘Bob Dylan Q&A about “The Philosophy of Modern Song”’, The Official Bob Dylan Site , 20 December 2022, https://www.bobdylan.com/news/bob-dylan-interviewed-by- wall-street-journals-jeff-slate/.

[3] Bob Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022), 11.

[4] Dylan, 41.

[5] Dylan, 154.

[6] Dylan, 153.

[7] Slate, ‘Bob Dylan Q&A’.

[8] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song , 283.

[9] Dylan, 101.

[10] Dylan, 184.

[11] Simon Frith, ‘Pop Music’, in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, ed. Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street, Cambridge Companions to Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 94–95.

[12] David Browne, ‘“Jesus, Bob”: How Some Musicians Feel About Being Dissed by Dylan in “Philosophy of Modern Song”’, Rolling Stone , 16 November 2022, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bob-dylan-philosophy-of-modern-song-book-backlash-1234630949/ .

[13] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song , 7–10, 159–61, 203.

[14] Lewis Eugene Rowell, Thinking about Music: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Music (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 39.

[15] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song , 11, 17, 202.

[16] Dylan, 198.

[17] Dylan, 165.

[18] Aristotle, Politics , trans. Ernest Barker, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 312.

[19] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song , 79.

[20] Dylan, 275.

[21] Slate, ‘Bob Dylan Q&A’.

[22] Slate.

[23] Keir Keightley, ‘Reconsidering Rock’, in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock , ed. Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street, Cambridge Companions to Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 137.

[24] Slate, ‘Bob Dylan Q&A’.

[25] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 82.

[26] Dylan, 13.

[27] Dylan, 23.

[28] Dylan, 87.

[29] Dylan, 144, 334.

[30] Stephen Davies, ‘Rock versus Classical Music’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism vol. 57, no. 2 (1999): 199, https://doi.org/10.2307/432312 .

[31] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song , 87, 201, 229.

[32] Slate, ‘Bob Dylan Q&A’.

[33] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song , 229.

[34] The distaste is more apparent when one looks at Dylan’s other references to the Beatles of late, where he has been apt to view them in a jaundiced light. While I’m sure interpretations differ, I can’t help but hear the “I Want to Hold Your Hand” reference in “Murder Most Foul” as Dylan looking askance at the vaguely disingenuous, infantilising title (“Hush lil children, you’ll soon understand / The Beatles are coming they’re gonna hold your hand”). In the “London Calling” essay, he namechecks the song again, portraying the Beatles and their world as quaint and twee next to the real London as captured by the Clash. Once again, what’s faddish is superseded by the real and true.

[35] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song , 245.

[36] Dylan, 9.

[37] Dylan, 79.

[38] Dylan, 151.

[39] Slate, ‘Bob Dylan Q&A’.

[40] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song , 275.

[41] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music , ed. and trans. John T. Scott, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 7 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998), 269–70.

[42] Gilbert B. Rodman, ‘Histories’, in Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture , ed. Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 44.

[43] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song , 17.

[44] Dylan, 59.

[45] Adorno, conversely, criticised this characteristic of popular music, where musical elements could be shifted around without affecting the whole (“Every detail is substitutable; it serves its function only as a cog in a machine”). See Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music , ed. Richard D. Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 440.

[46] R. A. Sharpe, Philosophy of Music: An Introduction (Chesham: Acumen, 2004), 9.

Works cited

Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music. Edited by Richard D. Leppert,

translated by Susan H. Gillespie, Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 2002.

Aristotle. Politics . Translated by Ernest Barker. Oxford World’s

Classics, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Browne, David. ‘“Jesus, Bob”: How Some Musicians Feel About Being Dissed

by Dylan in “Philosophy of Modern Song”’. Rolling Stone , 16

November 2022, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-

news/bob-dylan-philosophy-of-modern-song-book-backlash-1234630949/.

Davies, Stephen. “Rock versus Classical Music.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art

Criticism vol. 57, no. 2, 1999, pp. 193–204. https://doi.org/10.2307/432312 .

Dylan, Bob, dir. Eat the Document . 1972.

———. The Philosophy of Modern Song , New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.

———. Rough And Rowdy Ways , Columbia – 19439780982, 2020, compact disc.

———. World Gone Wrong, Columbia – COL 474857 2, 1993, compact disc.

Frith, Simon. “Pop Music.” The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock , edited 

by Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street, Cambridge Companions to

Music, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 93–108

Keightley, Keir. “Reconsidering Rock.” The Cambridge Companion to Pop and

Rock , eds. Frith, Straw, and Street. 109–42.

Rodman, Gilbert B. “Histories.” Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture , edited

by Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. 35–45.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to

Music . Edited and translated by John T. Scott, The Collected Writings of

Rousseau, vol. 7, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998.

Rowell, Lewis Eugene. Thinking about Music: An Introduction to the Philosophy of

Music , Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.

Scorsese, Martin, dir. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan , 2 discs, Hollywood:

Paramount, 2005. DVD.

Sharpe, R. A. P hilosophy of Music: An Introduction , Chesham: Acumen, 2004.

Slate, Jeff. “Bob Dylan Q&A about ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song,’” The

Official Bob Dylan Site , 20 December 2022,

https://www.bobdylan.com/news/bob-dylan- interviewed-by-wall-street-journals-jeff-slate/.

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Bob Dylan Reveals Himself Through 66 Songs

And it’s the closest we’re probably going to get.

As an author of all kinds of work—songs, poetry, a memoir, radio-show commentary, the occasional film script or Nobel lecture —Bob Dylan has been engaged for more than 60 years in an inquiry into authorship itself. From his earliest days as a folk singer in MacDougal Street coffeehouses, he has been known for drawing freely, often brazenly, from the work of his predecessors (and occasionally his contemporaries), employing the “folk process”—through which each singer makes additions or alterations to a shared body of material—to produce work idiosyncratically his own. In Chronicles: Volume One , his 2004 book of impressionistic reminiscences, Dylan seems to have mined an old issue of Time magazine and an assortment of other sources to construct a collage representing his memories and ideas. Even with his paintings , many of which appear to be based on still frames from movies and published photographs, Dylan has tempted accusations of appropriation . His whole body of work is largely concerned with the question, “Who really made this?”

Read: Bob Dylan cheats again?

The answer to that may be “Who cares?” And the answer to that is: Bob Dylan cares. The nature, the mechanics, and the meaning of creativity, especially as it pertains to music, matter a lot to him, as he makes abundantly clear with his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song . A collection of short essays, lyrical riffs, chunks of facts, and unpredictable digressions, generously illustrated with historical photos suitable for enjoyment at the coffee table, the book presents Dylan’s thoughts on a quirky selection of 66 songs recorded over the past 100 years or so.

The book is all about authorship—how singers remake songs through their performances , how listeners re-create them in their minds to suit their needs, and how Dylan can make songs of every type his own by the way he thinks and writes about them. It’s a work of authorship, obviously, and at the same time a critique of, and a bit of a prank on, the idea of authorship, too.

Much of Dylan’s philosophy on the workings of popular music since the rise of recordings is centered on performance rather than composition. “Perry Como lived in every moment of every song he sang,” Dylan writes in a chapter on “Without a Song,” the valentine to singing that Frank Sinatra recorded with Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra in the 1940s, and that Sinatra’s acolyte Como made a smooth-music hit in the early ’50s. Como, Dylan explains, “didn’t have to write the song to do it … When he stood and sang, he owned the song and he shared it and we believed every single word.”

Dylan demonstrates here how a skilled vocalist such as Como could, through a sensitive interpretation, be as creatively expressive as a songwriter. If the point seems incongruous coming from a songwriter of genius, it befits a writing singer who, late in life, made five albums’ worth of material originally recorded by singers such as Sinatra and Como.

Dylan hangs each chapter on a particular recording of a song (“Whiffenpoof Song,” released as a single by Bing Crosby in 1947; “On the Street Where You Live,” released as a single by Vic Damone in 1956), and generally focuses on the performer or performers, though exceptions to this abound. Dylan begins some chapters with a looping, free-form narrative, spinning an imaginative tale connected in some way to the idea or theme of the song. For Ray Charles’s recording of “I Got a Woman,” for instance, we get a punchy little noir story about a tired guy driving across town to certain disappointment, “sweat-soaked shirt sticking to his car seat,” tapping “the steering wheel in time to Fathead Newman’s tenor saxophone.”

These sections are certainly the most overtly literary parts of The Philosophy of Modern Song , and the literature they conjure is the racy pulp of bus-depot book racks in mid-century America: the fiction of writers like James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, who luxuriated in taboo and whose work, by the early 1960s, came to be seen by the culture as the lingua franca of cool. Dylan revels in this world of “gypsies, tramps, and thieves” in a way that feels daring in a quaint, almost corny way, but he also seems sometimes strangely desperate to shock. For the chapter on Webb Pierce’s cover of “There Stands the Glass,” for example, Dylan goes far in making the song his own, spinning a weird fictive backstory about a combat vet haunted by images of the atrocities he committed in the name of duty: “He sees a little boy two years old and he murders him, he sees his buddies slit a little girl open with a knife, strip off her clothes and rape her, then he shoots her with an automatic, his horny buddy.” Told with unshakable specificity, the story doesn’t have a thing to do with the song, but it shocks like the high-voltage fiction of the trash literati.

Read: What Bob Dylan knows about this moment

In many of the chapters, Dylan treats the authors of the songs like poster boys out of a fanzine, providing tidbit-rich arcana such as the fact that Ricky Nelson, whose rockabilly ballad “Poor Little Fool” made No. 1 on the very first Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1958, was not only a skilled tennis player and trapeze artist, but a starting player on his high-school football team, following the cleated footsteps of his father, Ozzie Nelson, who had once been starting quarterback on the Rutgers University team. In other cases, Dylan withholds biography in service to the work. “Knowing a singer’s life story doesn’t particularly help your understanding of a song,” he writes in the chapter on “Pump It Up,” by Elvis Costello. “It’s what a song makes you feel about your own life that’s important.” Popular music is a collaborative art, Dylan reminds us, with not only writers, performers, musicians, and record producers playing parts, but the audience also contributing through the points of reference each listener brings to the music. In a sense, Dylan seems to suggest, a song’s listeners are its authors too.

At the same time, for Dylan to stress the irrelevance of biography is to remind us of his own biography and its role in his work. His resistance to personal scrutiny and skill at obfuscation and self-invention are not distractions from the story of his life; they are the story of his life. Chronicles: Volume One reads as a vividly accurate account of the mind of a brilliant fabulist, a master of entwined fact and fiction. If he never gets around to writing Volume Two , Dylan has provided a semblance of a sequel to Chronicles in The Philosophy of Modern Song . Though the book is ostensibly about songs by other artists, there is the outline of another book, a shadow book about Dylan, within it.

We can see a few things clearly. From the selection of songs and singers, one could conclude that Dylan has little interest in women as creative artists. A mere four of the dozens of artists featured in the book are female (five if you count The Platters, who had one female singer), and the women who collaborated with men in the songwriting—or, in some cases, wrote the songs on their own—are mostly ignored or glossed over. When he does discuss women, Dylan often depicts them as dark temptresses and shrews, luring men to their doom: witchy women, black-magic women. Of course, he’s correctly reflecting the way women are depicted in the songs. But he’s the person who chose the songs. And just think of the countless artists not included: Loretta Lynn, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Dolly Parton, Pink, Solange, Taylor Swift. I promised myself not to get caught up in second-guessing every song choice Dylan made, because any person’s selection of 66 songs, including my own, would inevitably have innumerable holes and omissions. Still, Dylan’s refusal to acknowledge the depth of women’s contributions to American song is indefensible.

We see, too, that Dylan thinks very little of hip-hop—or, more likely, that he doesn’t think about it at all. We see that he has some discomforting ideas about marriage, including the thought that polygamy would solve a lot of marital problems. “It’s nobody’s business how many wives a man has,” he says. I guess we can—or should—assume he’s joking. We also find a few intriguing surprises: That Dylan knows much more than I ever realized about a range of obscure subjects, such as the convoluted authorship of Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night”; the production history of the Disney documentary White Wilderness ; and the intricacies of translating Albert Camus from the French. In the absence of endnotes, there’s no knowing the source of such material. We can only take what pleasure there is in it and marvel at the author’s unfading ability to test the meaning of authorship and make the work his own.

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• Book of the Day

Bob Dylan’s problem with women

In The Philosophy of Modern Song, 62 of the 66 featured songs are performed by men. Is the 81-year-old songwriter still intent on provocation?

By Jude Rogers

In last year’s bustling pre-Christmas book market, one music title stood out. By a busy songwriter and performer about to enter his eighties, it contained essays, rare photographs, tender memorabilia, plus an introduction by the poet Paul Muldoon. Paul McCartney: The Lyrics was all about underlining the legacy of an artist in a specific way: one that was distinguished but generous, welcoming and relatable.

This year, another book looking back at the past arrives from an active, elderly legend, but its tenor is different. His book’s title is grander for starters: The Philosophy of Modern Song . The inside jacket boasts that it’s Bob Dylan ’s first published work since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 (take that, McCartney), and his first book since his wild – and wildly successful – 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One . 

A book of Dylan’s ruminations on the recorded music of others, it resembles an “epic poem”, the press puff expands, full of “dreamlike riffs” that add “to the work’s transcendence”. But from this book’s cover onwards – the jacket is emblazoned with pulpy red lettering and a relaxed snap of Little Richard and Eddie Cochran standing next to the obscure rockabilly singer Alis Lesley, for no discernible reason – this is the work of a legend wanting to confuse people, to upturn the idea of relatable legacy completely.

When I started writing about music aged 25, Dylan seemed as intimidating to me as a Mount Rushmore sculpture. A great man who dominated the American popular music landscape (as well as the British monthly music magazine market), I presumed he had to be gazed at by us minions in awe. This set me against him. Time taught me to enjoy Dylan’s impishness instead, his capacity to shock.

I loved how he had deliberately made his 1970 album Self Portrait loose and messy to stop people mythologising his genius (I also love the glorious song that begins it, “All the Tired Horses”, on which he doesn’t sing). I still adore the festive two-finger protest of his 2009 album, Christmas in the Heart , and how its lead single, “Must Be Santa”, made the devotees rage, but still makes my heart sing every year.

The Saturday Read

Morning call.

Reading The Philosophy of Modern Song with the same spry approach makes it quite the romp – up to a point. It harks back to Dylan’s playful radio show Theme Time Radio Hour on XM Satellite Radio, which originally ran to 100 episodes from 2006 to 2009 (two standalone extras were released in 2015 and 2020, the latter to promote a whisky brand he’d just launched). 

Its song choices were based around subjects like “Hair”, “Drinking” and “Death and Taxes”, and some of those lists get recycled, a little lazily, in these colourful pages. The show was also zhuzhed up by vintage radio jingles, readings from poetry, emails and letters. The equivalents here are old photographs (none of Dylan, but of the artists he features), magazine covers, film posters and small classified adverts, many of them promising to teach people piano or singing at rapid speed, a shortcut to soaking up the promise of rock and roll. 

Trying to work out the significance of these images is half the fun, of course. I wonder if the harmonica advert around the first track in the book – a 1963 country single, “Detroit City”, sung by Bobby Bare – is a nod to the instrument with which Dylan was strongly associated around that same period, during his early years of fame. “Detroit City” is about a man who has failed to make his fortune in the big smoke, and his desperation to go home, although that world is also a fantasy. “The listener knows that [world] just doesn’t exist,” Dylan writes. “That’s why this song works.” This could have been Dylan’s lot. Instead, here we are.

[See also: The battle of the Dylanologists ]

Dylan’s chapters often begin with passages of speedy, staccato ruminations addressed directly to the reader, before going on to more factual accounts of the chosen songs. It’s hard not to hear the ruminations in Dylan’s high-pitched, tremulous wheeze (I read the entry on Ricky Nelson’s cutesy 1958 ballad “Poor Little Fool” thusly (my italics and extra letters): “in the past you entertained yourself with other people’s  heartssss , you stretched the  ruuuuules ”). 

Many of these  ruuuminayshuuuuuns  would get most music magazine editors scrambling for the red pen. They rarely add anything new to the conversation, but they’re often campy fun. Their style also suits the fact that many songs in the book are mid 20th-century confections, packed with melodrama or high excitement. A few more surprising choices appear, but they’re not as extreme as when Dylan played LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out” or Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” on Theme Time Radio Hour . 

Songs by the Who, the Clash and Elvis Costello are among the most eye-widening selections. When Dylan writes that Costello’s group, the Attractions, were “the better band of all their contemporaries”, you wonder if he liked the idea of his successors swooning at the five-star review. He then reminds us why he might have chosen Costello’s song “Pump It Up” in the first place: it was inspired by Dylan’s delivery of his 1965 track “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.

Dylan’s writing is at its best when it’s funny. Debating the merits of wealth around Elvis Presley’s 1956 recording of “Money Honey”, he unleashes a zinger: “No matter how many chairs you have, you only have one ass.” When discussing the rock’n’roll tailor Nuta Kotlyarenko, who designed the rhinestone-covered Nudie suits beloved by country stars Porter Wagoner and Hank Williams, Dylan makes a comment that could refer to his transition from being born Robert Zimmerman to becoming Bob Dylan: “Like many men who reinvent themselves, details get dodgy in places.”

His passion can also be touching. On the magic of Perry Como’s single, “Without a Song”, he writes like a sweet, earnest teenager: “there is nothing small you can say about it”. On political songs like the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion”, he’s full of praise for its writers, Barrett Strong and Norman Whitfield, who were great hit-makers for Motown Records. “Everything they wrote is meaningful and true to life… they saw it and told it relentlessly.”

But if we’re relying on Dylan to consistently offer clarity on these songs, we’re out of luck. Some of his entries feel dashed off or too short, even if they’re meant to leave us wanting more. Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” is the sound of a preacher “sounding the alarm”, knowing “the world’s gonna fall apart”, but that’s about it. The entry for Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman” is a brief whinge about relationships going sour, with no comment on the substance of the song itself, or its actual lyrics.

The biggest disappointment is the way Dylan’s book is utterly drenched in testosterone. (Its back cover image, a vintage photograph of earnest men in a record shop, should have been a warning.) Only four songs in this book of 66 are performed by women. Sonny Bono gets more attention than Cher in an entry on “Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves”. Judy Garland gets one word in a chapter that is ostensibly on her version of “Come Rain or Come Shine” (“razzmatazz”). Nina Simone gets some kudos for her “measured, defiant delivery” on “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”, although the ambiguous opening lines of Albert Camus’s 1942 novel, L’Étranger  – not a known influence on the lyric – warrant much longer analysis. 

A list of great Detroit musicians solely comprises men, leaving out Aretha Franklin, Martha Reeves and Diana Ross. Much worse is how Dylan enjoys riffing on women being monstrous and doing poor men wrong. (He could argue this is because he’s only describing the songs that he chose, but, hey, he chose them.)

His entry on the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” is particularly gut-churning. Dylan mourns “the woman with the world view – the progressive woman – youthful, whimsical, and grotesque”, and how “the lips of her cunt are a steel trap”. Discussing Johnny Taylor’s 1973 divorce song “Cheaper to Keep Her”, he decries “women’s lib lobbyists [taking] turns putting man back on his heels until he is pinned behind the eight ball dodging the shrapnel from the smashed glass ceiling”.

But before “the feminists chase him through the village with torches”, he says, by means of apology, women can commit polygamy too. “Have at it, ladies. There’s another glass ceiling for you to break.” His disdain feels palpable.

These are dark shadows in a book that holds light, amusing treasures, although not as many as the press puff would like you to believe. You wonder whether Dylan included these rants because he enjoys the idea of staying provocative – not for him is the smoothing-out of his life story to suit the whims of the Christmas book market.

But The Philosophy of Modern Song also reminds us that loving music isn’t about gazing upon artists indiscriminately, in jaw-sunken awe – which is something he agrees with, weirdly enough. “Knowing a singer’s life story doesn’t particularly help your understanding of a song,” he writes. “It’s what a song makes you feel about your own life that’s important.”

The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan Simon & Schuster, 352pp, £35

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The Philosophy of Modern Song Hardcover – November 1, 2022

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Simon & Schuster
• Publication date November 1, 2022
• Dimensions 7.38 x 1.3 x 9.13 inches
• ISBN-10 1451648707
• ISBN-13 978-1451648706
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; First Edition (November 1, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1451648707
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1451648706
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.2 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.38 x 1.3 x 9.13 inches
• #75 in Earth Sciences (Books)
• #259 in Arts & Literature Biographies
• #535 in Memoirs (Books)

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About the author

Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, artist and writer. He has been influential in popular music and culture for more than five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when his songs chronicled social unrest, although Dylan repudiated suggestions from journalists that he was a spokesman for his generation. Nevertheless, early songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" became anthems for the American civil rights and anti-war movements. After he left his initial base in the American folk music revival, his six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone" altered the range of popular music in 1965. His mid-1960s recordings, backed by rock musicians, reached the top end of the United States music charts while also attracting denunciation and criticism from others in the folk movement.

Dylan's lyrics have incorporated various political, social, philosophical, and literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed to the burgeoning counterculture. Initially inspired by the performances of Little Richard, and the songwriting of Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, and Hank Williams, Dylan has amplified and personalized musical genres. His recording career, spanning 50 years, has explored the traditions in American song—from folk, blues, and country to gospel, rock and roll, and rockabilly to English, Scottish, and Irish folk music, embracing even jazz and the Great American Songbook. Dylan performs with guitar, keyboards, and harmonica. Backed by a changing line-up of musicians, he has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the Never Ending Tour. His accomplishments as a recording artist and performer have been central to his career, but songwriting is considered his greatest contribution.

Since 1994, Dylan has published six books of drawings and paintings, and his work has been exhibited in major art galleries. As a musician, Dylan has sold more than 100 million records, making him one of the best-selling artists of all time. He has also received numerous awards including eleven Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award. Dylan has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Minnesota Music Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and Songwriters Hall of Fame. The Pulitzer Prize jury in 2008 awarded him a special citation for "his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." In May 2012, Dylan received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Alberto Cabello from Vitoria Gasteiz (Bob Dylan) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Customers say

Customers find the content interesting, wise, and recommend it as a great gift for Dylan lovers. They also appreciate the photos and visuals, describing the book as beautifully printed and illustrated. However, some customers find the title misleading and the book contains no complete song lyrics. Opinions are mixed on readability, with some finding it well-written and enjoyable, while others find the text disappointing and rambling. Readers also have mixed feelings about the reading experience, with others finding it unexpected and a joy to read. Customers also have different opinions on the value, with those finding it worth every penny and others saying it's a waste of money.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book very interesting, entertaining, and informative in sections. They also say it's an original approach and book. Readers also mention that the book is a very smart account of how songs work, exquisitely interweaved, and useful.

"...exciting characters, songs, stories, his emotions, different ideas, his wisdom , solutions, beautiful places, fantasy, reality, interactions between..." Read more

"...Very high quality writing. Very intelligent and rich in facts and creativity . The book is and printed on high quality paper...." Read more

"...It is entertaining and informative in sections , but it can also be a bit frustrating. I guess you could say the same about many of his songs...." Read more

"... Highly recommended ." Read more

Customers find the musical content interesting, funny, and great. They also say the song list is great and each song becomes a gift. Readers also appreciate the insight from a legendary songwriter.

"...He freestyles. Pulls in, combines cool words, exciting characters, songs , stories, his emotions, different ideas, his wisdom, solutions, beautiful..." Read more

"...Each chapter covers one song. Most of them are very well known songs . Dylan divides each chapter of the book in to two parts...." Read more

"...The little tidbits of trivia are fun to read and often illustrate what makes a song memorable . Dylan fans will eat all of this up, others may not...." Read more

"...As he puts it, “Music is timeless ; a thing with which to make memories and the memory itself.”..." Read more

Customers appreciate the photos in the book. They say it's filled with photos that speak as much as the text.

"...The binding is very good. The book contains many photographs ...." Read more

"...This is a very short book, loaded with illustrations and old photos , some of which are strangely entertaining...." Read more

"...Cool illustrations and photographs , nice layout. This is a book that a Nobel Prize winner writes...." Read more

"...The photos are amazing . The text breaking down the power of the songs is poetry...." Read more

Customers appreciate the visuals in the book. They mention it's beautifully printed and beautifully illustrated.

"...He was right in front of my eyes, his hair looked so good !..." Read more

"...Other information is included. The first section of the chapters artful , creative, and very powerful in style and the second section is factual...." Read more

"... Cool illustrations and photographs, nice layout. This is a book that a Nobel Prize winner writes...." Read more

"I don't know what I think of this. The design of the book is fun , like a Broadway billboard or a circus playbill advertising Freaks!..." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the reading experience. Some find the unexpected wit a joy to read, and the journey enjoyable. Others say it’s disappointing, boring, and simplistic.

"...How not to like a person so lovable, who vibrates with life, fun , interesting, precise, true to himself, fearless like crazy, so precious and who..." Read more

"...The little tidbits of trivia are fun to read and often illustrate what makes a song memorable. Dylan fans will eat all of this up, others may not...." Read more

"...But the results here are surprisingly superficial ...." Read more

"...Anyway, this is a really cool book with a lot of fun essays of varying lengths on all types of music along with Dylan's classic humor." Read more

Customers are mixed about the readability. Some find the book well-written and enjoyable, while others say the text is disappointing and disappointing. They also say the interpretations of songs are muddled and confusing.

"...and does it all with deep sensitivity, wisdom and unmatched style for 300+ pages . Must be fun doing this kind of dreaming...." Read more

"...Footnote: you may have heard some reviewers say the writing is characterized by misogyny ...." Read more

"... Very high quality writing . Very intelligent and rich in facts and creativity. The book is and printed on high quality paper...." Read more

"...nature of this book- 5 stars, but my disappointment of the lack of musical analysis brings it down to 4." Read more

Customers are mixed about the value of the book. Some mention it's worth every penny and worth a look, while others say it'll be a waste of money.

"...Overall it is worth a look if only to enlighten yourself to artists you might consider listening to for the first time or revisit again...." Read more

"...looking for insights into songwriting, this book is a waste of your hard-earned greenbacks ." Read more

"... Price and condition of the book were excellent ." Read more

"... Well worth the time , as was listening to Bob dj and ruminate other songs he loves on his theme time radio hour...his passion for music is so evident..." Read more

Customers find the song lyrics in the book misleading, meandering, and dull. They also say the book contains no complete song lyrics.

"...is entertaining and informative in sections, but it can also be a bit frustrating . I guess you could say the same about many of his songs...." Read more

"...Even the title of this book is wrong . No philosophy is discussed. Tons of cliches. Dj patter about a few dozen songs...." Read more

"...However, The title is misleading . I was expecting more in terms of what he believes about lyrics and song writing...." Read more

"...The main flaw is that the song lyrics are not included ...." Read more

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BOSTON'S PREMIER ONLINE ARTS MAGAZINE

Book Review: Bob Dylan’s “Philosophy of Modern Song”

By Scott McLennan

The point of Bob Dylan’s project is emotional rather than definitive: to probe the power of song to influence us, make us feel, and ultimately transform us.

The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan. Simon & Schuster, 352 pages, $45.

Dylan serves up essays on 66 songs, each piece sparking conversation of the sort you could imagine hearing in the aisles of a vinyl-packed record store or at the bar of a nightclub that keeps a small stage in the corner for the benefit of local musicians and the people who still love it live.

This effort is by no means Dylan’s catalogue of what he thinks are undeniably great songs. Rather, The Philosophy of Modern Song is a ramble through tunes that Dylan loves for all different kinds of reasons. The point of the project is emotional rather than definitive: to probe the power of song to influence us, make us feel, and ultimately transform us.

The essays vary in length and intensity: the book’s 340 pages are padded with photos and graphics germane to the speculative vibe.

Of course, a book like this, written by a songwriter who has inspired a cottage industry devoted to analysis of his work and his life, will feed right into said bloated industry: What is Dylan offering up about himself when he comments on other songs? Criticism as a form of autobiography.

Ironically, beginning with the opening piece on Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City” and through the rest of the book, Dylan pushes against the conventional notion that art is inevitably autobiographical. When it comes to songs, the listener’s reception and reaction are far more important to him.

And boy, does he have some interesting receptions and reactions to the songs he chose to write about.

Dylan imagines that the narrator of Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass” is a war veteran who has been mentally and physically ravaged by his experiences in battle. There is nothing in the lyric to suggest that, but Dylan lets the song take his mind in that direction. He imagines who that person might be, looking at a glass of whiskey that promises to ease his pain and take away his memories. The essay also breaks into a side discussion about the creation of the flamboyant Nudie suit and its importance in country music. On the one hand, you can’t help but wonder how Dylan got to these conclusions. But you are grateful because they encourage the book’s sections of electrifying prose.

At 81, Dylan remains an arch, dissident critic of his surroundings, sounding no less defiant than he did on his early albums that served as beacons for other restless thinkers, activists, and artists who gravitated to his work in the ’60s. But this is a Dylan who has moved from the remonstrations of 1963’s “Masters of War” to supplying a laudatory list of military generals who “cleared the path for Presley to Sing/ Carved the path for Martin Luther King” in 2021’s “Mother of Muses.”

Bob Dylan is not an angry old man. Photo: David Gahr

By no means has Dylan simply become an angry old man feasting on Fox News all day. However, his discourse and perspective are firmly rooted in an admiration of the music that emerged between 1950 and 1970. Throughout The Philosophy of Modern Song  Dylan bemoans America’s cultural and intellectual decline from that period. “This is the sound that made America great,” Dylan enthuses about the urgency heard in early Sun Records singles. He toys with today’s political vernacular again when writes in an essay triggered by “Saturday Night at the Movies” (which does not deal at all with that Drifters song) that “People keep talking about making America great again. Maybe they should start with movies.”

Dylan strongly challenges political correctness, extreme conservatism, and the ease with which a song or a movie is decontextualized and demonized. In Dylan’s eyes, the result sanitizes our cultural conversation. The purpose of the well-meaning muzzling may be to create a harmonious society, but setting up such limits ends up shutting down the kind of invaluable critical thinking that dares to challenge authority.

Dylan discusses how Pete Seeger’s “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a sharp criticism of the Vietnam War, found a wide listenership because he performed it on the Smothers Brothers TV variety show at a time when “variety” meant exposing different kinds of art and entertainment to a mass audience drawn from all income levels.

Today, people are encouraged to gravitate toward their own self-designated tastes and beliefs. There is no longer a hunger to be confronted by the unknown, the unfamiliar, the possibly confrontational. Dylan pointedly argues that it “turns out, the best way to shut people up isn’t to take away their forum — It’s to give them all their own separate pulpits.”

Dylan is at his most acerbic in an essay that is ostensibly about the Johnny Taylor-sung “Cheaper to Keep Her.” He immediately veers into a screed about divorce attorneys that is filled with standard male chauvinistic tropes. Dylan sizes up the criticism he anticipates for his views and doubles down on the patriarchal taunts. In other parts of the book, Dylan’s anger, disgust, and disappointment spawn provocative observations and opinions that you may or may not agree with, but you can at least reasonably consider. In “Cheaper to Keep Her,” Dylan’s take is just plain ugly.

Aside from irrational ramblings, Dylan can be scholarly and passionate in digging into the mechanics of the songs he writes about. He makes many astute observations, such as how The Who’s primal “My Generation” contains the seeds to the grand themes of the rock opera Tommy . Or how The Clash, singing about making a home by the river, strike a universal chord of dissatisfaction — among those who see the Thames outside their window and those who live by the Mississippi. Both long for an escape from the bullshit raining down on them.

Still, Dylan cautions against over-analyzing songs to the point of neutering their artistic force. He celebrates the mystery of a masterful song, when the right words are combined with the right music. There is no predictable way to make that happen — which is why you can only admire, and learn, from those who have pulled it off.

The Fugs — Dylan prefers the Fugs’ raunchy proto-punk “C.I.A Man” to Johnny Rivers’s catchy and slick “Secret Agent Man.”

Dylan, no surprise, embraces the heartfelt and authentic over the polished and precise. He much prefers the Fugs’ raunchy proto-punk “C.I.A Man” to Johnny Rivers’s catchy and slick “Secret Agent Man.”

Sometimes, as in the case of Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard’s version of Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty,” it is a matter of bringing all the elements, including performance, together. The chemistry of that writer’s work meeting those voices in that production — these elemental ingredients, on that occasion, create the monumental.

No stranger to protest music, Dylan lifts up the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion” and Mose Allison’s “Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy” as examples of how similar critical broadsides can be effective in completely different ways. Both the Temptations’ frenzy and Mose’s bemusement are equally effective in provoking outrage.

Dylan delves into the importance of nailing arrangements. He contrasts the intricacies of Marty Robbins’s “El Paso” with the predictability of Johnny Cash’s “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” — and sees that both are of equal value. Dylan considers the skills of particular singers (big fan of Ricky Nelson and Bobby Darin) as well as the archetypes we identify with (outlaws, we like; criminals, not so much. And everybody loves a fool). He also goes into all manner of minutiae in explaining why a certain song leaves a lasting impression. For example, in cataloging songs about shoes, “Blue Suede Shoes” reigns supreme for many, many reasons.

Dylan U, if you choose to enroll, offers lessons in sociology, history, political science, religion, language, economics, psychology, and geography. And the coursework, aside from downward slides into misogyny, is humorous, expansive, and informative. Dylan authoritatively throws down controversial assessments and analyses here, but he invites agreement on just about everything. Aside from a shared understanding that, for our survival, songs are as important as air. If you disagree, you deserve neither.

Scott McLennan covered music for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette from 1993 to 2008. He then contributed music reviews and features to the Boston Globe , Providence Journal , Portland Press Herald , and WGBH, as well as to the Arts Fuse . He also operated the NE Metal blog to provide in-depth coverage of the region’s heavy metal scene.

A wonderful take, Scott.. Interesting that Dylan makes a point of praising an idol of his early teen years, Ricky Nelson, since in his first book, “Chronicles,” he says that hearing Nelson’s likable, but slickly shallow “Traveling Man” in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse in spring of 1961 made him think the time had come for a deeper music.

Fascinating. There was one Christmas morning, six or seven years ago, when I was not speaking to my brother, and was alone dog sitting at a neighbour’s house. I scrolled Facebook and Bob’s site came up. It said ‘write a message to Bob’s… I did. I can’t remember what I wrote. Immediately a response came back, and then a sort of explanation in the ‘we are happy you are a fan’ kind of vein, then it shifted to private messaging. Somebody wrote ‘its me, Bob Dylan ‘… So now I was engaged in private correspondence with either Bob, or someone else saying they’re Bob. I shivered, gulped, and wrote my best ‘ honesty test’ by telling whomever that I had been on a bicycle trip in 1998 through Duluth, and had looked for clues to his early life there. In a camera store, some staff informed me that an old friend of his had an Italian restaurant nearby and Bob still kept in touch. ( I’m being as brief as I can here). The messaged wrote back and said, “you’re right; I do have a friend who owns, and runs an Italian restaurant in Duluth. You are a true fan from a long time ago.” He/ they also wrote ” I’ m reaching out across the world this morning to my fans…” I wrote excitedly that I had taken a sketchbook to a Toronto concert in 2008 and drawn him and the band from the third row. He replied that if I came to one of his shows that next summer he’d be happy to receive the drawings. He said ” we’ll be in Montreal and Toronto for sure” I pushed on and said how moved I was by Patti Smith’s performance at his Nobel prize ceremony where she sang Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall. He said that ‘Patti is a very philosophical person who has lifted many souls’… I’m Jewish, agnostic, but still sensitive to the tingly feeling of Christmas. Was I really engaged in conversation with Bob? Was it a hoax of some sort? After some sentences politely framed to not gush too much, I returned to the Facebook public site, publicly messaged that I’d just maybe, or maybe not, been messaging with Bob Dylan. Another subscriber replied to me “yep, that was really Bob. Nice exchange.. ” and this stranger was some dude named Marshall Tackett. That name struck me. Was he possibly a relative of Fred Tackett? Could this be a clue as to the authenticity of my Christmas morning exchange with my lifelong idol? I will take this mystery to the end, I am sure. Other phrases in our total exchange seemed like Bob- style diction. I’m sharing this now, wondering if anyone out there has verification or de-verification information for me. I can handle either possibility. Sometimes I think it doesn’t matter whether it really was him or an imposter. I did go to the Toronto concert. I brought a drawing. I coaxed security into taking it from me to try and deliver it to Bob, with a letter, of course, explaining everything. I haven’t had a response. It’s okay; it left me changed on that morning, for the better. Thanks ‘Bob’. God bless.

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The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan review – an enlightening listen-along

Dylan meditates on 66 songs he holds dear in an eclectic collection of essays that breathes new life into groundbreaking hits while relishing obscurities and oddities

I n 1993, Bob Dylan released World Gone Wrong , an album of cover versions of what might be called pre-modern songs by some of the early blues and folk performers that he revered. Dylan’s sleeve notes for the album are a thing of wonder in themselves: short, sometimes surreal riffs on the timeless quality of stark and mysterious songs that sound old as the hills but, as his writing pointed out, possessed a deep contemporary resonance.

Despite its high-flown and somewhat misleading title, The Philosophy of Modern Song is a kind of strange companion to those sleeve notes rather than a philosophical treatise on the art and craft of songwriting. Illustrated with a wealth of sometimes tangentially linked photographs (publicity stills, snapshots, landscapes and classic documentary images by the likes of Dorothea Lange and William Klein), it comprises 66 deeply subjective essays on songs Dylan holds dear, from standards and groundbreakers to obscurities and oddities.

Often, the juxtapositions are extreme: Bing Crosby’s charming but very odd ditty Whiffenpoof Song rubs shoulders with the Clash’s punk rock anthem London Calling. The formal brilliance of Jimmy Webb’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix is celebrated alongside the wild, untrammelled energy of rockabilly pioneers such as Sonny Burgess. The sophisticated soul of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes gives way to the gothic thrust of Johnny Paycheck, whom Dylan describes as “the outlaw all the other country singers claimed to be”. (One of his songs is called (Pardon Me) I’ve Got Someone to Kill.)

There are surprises aplenty, not least the almost sacrilegious absence of a single song by the Beatles – are there any songwriters more “modern” than Lennon and McCartney? Dylan, though, has never been an anglophile, or an artist much impressed by elaborate studio techniques or groundbreaking sonic invention – Brian Wilson does not appear either. No Carole King or Joni Mitchell songs, but Nina Simone is rightly hymned for her “measured defiant delivery” of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.

Judy Garland is also here alongside Rosemary Clooney and Cher – good to see Gypsys, Tramps and Thieves receiving its due, with Dylan quipping that it “could easily be the answer to the question, ‘Name three types of people you’d like to have dinner with’”.

His selections are mostly American (the exceptions being the Who, the Clash and Elvis Costello) and tend towards the unapologetically old fashioned, whether that be the rough and rowdy roots music that he has always been drawn to – blues, rockabilly, bluegrass, early folk – or the pre-pop standards he has homaged on his recent trio of cover albums. There are quite a few crooners featured here: Perry Como, Vic Damone, Dean Martin and, inevitably, Frank Sinatra, though Strangers in the Night seems an oddly lightweight choice – Sinatra himself hated it. It does however give Dylan a chance to trace the song’s “murky” history: the authorship of both the melody and the lyrics are contested. It’s that kind of book: discursive, unpredictable, but always illuminating. Characteristically Dylan, in fact.

Intriguingly, several of the essays are also accompanied by more imaginative “riffs” in which Dylan evokes the atmosphere or emotional resonance of a lyric by stepping inside the mind of the narrator and, by extension, the songwriter. Of the Who’s My Generation, he writes: “In this song people are trying to slap you around, slap you in the face, vilify you. They’re rude and slam you down, take cheap shots. They don’t like you because you pull out all the stops and go for broke.” From there, though, he goes on to uncover several layers of emotional complexity – defensiveness, grievance, insecurity – that are all but masked by the song’s arrogant amphetamine attitude.

Most of the time, this iconoclastic approach makes for heady and exhilarating stuff, though his reading of Hank Williams’s classic country ballad Your Cheatin’ Heart strikes me as wilfully perverse. Williams wrote it as a bruised response to his ex-wife’s infidelities, but Dylan sees it as “the song of a con artist… the swindler who sold me a faulty bill of goods”, a crook whose cheatin’ heart “brought poison and pestilence into the home of millions”. Even as a metaphor for romantic betrayal, that’s quite a leap of interpretation.

Elsewhere, the insights are more acute, often surprisingly so. Who but Dylan could recognise the conceptual link between bluegrass and heavy metal? “Both are musical forms steeped in tradition,” he writes. “They are the two forms of music that visually and audibly have not changed in decades. People in their respective fields still dress like Bill Monroe and Ronnie James Dio.”

There are many moments in The Philosophy of Modern Song when you realise that it is not just the breadth of Dylan’s musical knowledge that is on display here, but the depth of his listening. He has an unerring ability to pinpoint what sets a song – or a singer, or a group – apart from their contemporaries. You may be as intrigued as I was by his choosing London Calling, at least until you read his opening paragraph:

Punk rock is the music of frustration, and anger, but the Clash are different. Theirs is the music of desperation. They were a desperate group. They have to get it all in. And they have so little time. A lot of their songs are overblown, overwritten, well-intentioned. But not this one. This is probably the Clash at their best and most relevant, their most desperate. The Clash were always the group they imagined themselves to be.

That’s a hell of a lot of insight to pack into just a few lines.

The sense of having “to get it all in”, of being driven to express confused emotions or wild desires through chaotic but impassioned songs, is a characteristic of several of Dylan’s choices. For me, his writing really catches fire when he is hymning unsung outsiders, the mavericks and one-offs who he seems temperamentally drawn to, whose energy is untameable and thus utterly unsuited to the mainstream. A case in point is the little-known rockabilly singer Jimmy Wages, who grew up in the same neighbourhood as Elvis, and recorded Take Me (From This Garden of Evil), which Dylan reckons is probably “the first and only gospel rockabilly record”. Two decades before the Clash, it is also a study in desperation. “Jimmy sees the world for what it is,” writes Dylan, “This is no peace in the valley.”

You may be similarly astonished by the Osborne Brothers’ unearthly bluegrass song, Ruby, Are You Mad?, the high-pitched vocal delivered over frenetic banjo and guitar playing that propels it at a momentum more suited to hardcore punk. Dylan cites it approvingly as “a song to drive your car over a cliff to with the radio still on… and you won’t feel a thing”. Not exactly a deeply philosophical analysis, but you get the picture.

Up against these wildly inventive outbursts, the smooth contours of a Bing Crosby or Perry Como song seem to have emerged out of a different America, a different cultural and psychological mindset: restrained, elegant, quietly persuasive. Under Dylan’s democratic gaze, though, they assume an equal importance. “When he stood and sang,” he writes of Como, “he owned the song and he shared it and we believed every single word. What more could you want from an artist?”

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Bob Dylan Announces New Book ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song’

By Andy Greene

Andy Greene

Bob Dylan has written his first book since his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One . The Philosophy of Modern Song , out November 8th, will be a collection of over 60 essays focusing on songs by other artists.

Dylan will analyze songwriters such as Stephen Foster, Elvis Costello, Hank Williams, and Nina Simone. “[Dylan] analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal,” a press release noted. “These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny.”

“And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition,” it continues. “Running throughout the book are nearly 150 carefully curated photos as well as a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work’s transcendence.”

Dylan has been working on the The Philosophy of Modern Song since 2010. “The publication of Bob Dylan’s kaleidoscopically brilliant work will be an international celebration of songs by one of the greatest artists of our time,” said Jonathan Karp, President and Chief Executive Officer of Simon & Schuster. “ The Philosophy of Modern Song could only have been written by Bob Dylan. His voice is unique, and his work conveys his deep appreciation and understanding of songs, the people who bring those songs to life, and what songs mean to all of us.”

Chronicles: Volume One was a non-traditional memoir that focused on his early days in New York City and the creation of his 1970 LP New Morning and his 1989 album Oh Mercy . Rumors of a Chronicles sequel circulated for years, and Dylan occasionally said he was working on it. “I think I can go back to the Blonde on Blonde album — that’s probably about as far back as I can go on the next book,” he told Rolling Stone in 2006. “Then I’ll probably go forward. I thought of an interesting time. I made this record, Under the Red Sky , with Don Was, but at the same time I was also doing the [second] Wilburys record. I don’t know how it happened that I got into both albums at the same time.”

He gave an update on Chronicles II in 2012, a year after he reportedly signed a six-book deal with Simon and Schuster. “I’m always working on parts of [another Chronicles ],” he told Rolling Stone in 2012. “But the last Chronicles I did all by myself. I’m not even really so sure I had a proper editor for that. I don’t want really to say too much about that. But it’s a lot of work. I don’t mind writing it, but it’s the rereading it and the time it takes to reread it – that for me is difficult.”

And while The Philosophy of Modern Song  is not another Chronicles , it should still be fascinating to Dylan fans that have never had the chance to hear him discuss the craft of songwriting in this much detail.

Dylan recently resumed his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour with a show in Phoenix, Arizona. It wraps up April 14th in Oklahoma City.

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• BOB DYLAN NEWSLETTER

The Philosophy of Modern Song

From the publisher:

The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan’s first book of new writing since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One —and since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.

Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny. And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition. Running throughout the book are nearly 150 carefully curated photos as well as a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work’s transcendence.

In 2020, with the release of his outstanding album Rough and Rowdy Ways , Dylan became the first artist to have an album hit the Billboard Top 40 in each decade since the 1960s. The Philosophy of Modern Song contains much of what he has learned about his craft in all those years, and like everything that Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement.

Pre-order today!

Bob Dylan: Anthology Volume 3

Bob Dylan Isn't Done Lying to Us Just Yet

The Philosophy of Modern Song is, as a title, almost entirely untrue. But the work is revealing nonetheless.

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links.

The title of this book is a lie.

There’s no “philosophy” offered here—no overarching theory or argument made about writing or singing songs. There’s not even an explanation of why Bob Dylan selected these particular 66 records as subjects for essays which encompass criticism, history, and fantastic leaps of reasoning.

As for “modern,” well, I guess that depends on your perspective. The most recent recording considered here is of the oldest composition—Stephen Foster’s 1849 “Nelly Was a Lady” cut by bluesman Alvin Youngblood Hart in 2004. Otherwise, there are just two songs from the 21 st century included, while almost half of the choices date from the 1950s, Bobby Zimmerman’s formative years. (It’s also worth noting that only four of his picks are performed by women.)

So, no, there’s no K-Pop, emo, chillwave, or trap represented in The Philosophy of Modern Song —the most “modern” genre presented is first-wave punk, and Dylan takes some issue even with those acts he includes: He writes that Elvis Costello’s writing (“Pump It Up”) includes “Too many thoughts, way too wordy. Too many ideas that just bang up against themselves,” and he says of the Clash (“London Calling”) that “A lot of their songs are overblown, overwritten, well-intentioned.”

Lying, though, is nothing new for the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature . He started making up his own backstory as soon as people started asking, and his magnificent 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One is full of easily disproven fabrications. But remember that accuracy isn’t necessarily the same thing as truth.

Most of these chapters, which range from one paragraph to a half-dozen pages, are a meditation on a song, an examination of its emotional root or the feeling it evokes. These are usually written in the second person, but the intimate “you” sometimes means the singer and sometimes the listener. Dylan’s voice leans toward hard-boiled mid-century jive: “You’re sitting in the shade, slumped out, anonymous, incognito, watching everything go by, unimpressed, hard-bitten—impenetrable” or “You want to be emancipated from all the hokum.”

Often, this approach is replaced or accompanied by a history lesson. These pieces are reminiscent of Dylan’s narration on his 100-episode “Theme Time Radio Hour” series, the clear precedent for this collection. And these turn out not to be lies at all. Rosemary Clooney’s “Come on-a My House” (which he describes as “the song of the deviant, the pedophile, the mass murderer”) really was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Saroyan and his cousin, Ross Bagdasarian, who later invented Alvin and the Chipmunks. Elsewhere, we learn that Leigh Brackett, who wrote the screenplay for The Big Sleep , also scripted the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back , and that the image of lemmings “rushing to their shared doom” is false, invented for a Disney documentary.

Some songs serve as launch pads for Dylan’s non-musical philosophizing. Johnnie Taylor’s “Cheaper to Keep Her” sets up a takedown of the divorce industry, building to a case for the benefits of polygamy. We learn the history of the iconic Western Wear staple the Nudie Suit, the contrast between George Bush’s Gulf War and George W. Bush’s Iraq War (Edwin Starr’s “War”), and the invention of the “universal language” Esperanto (“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”). Occasionally, the proceedings pause for a list—singers who break down in tears, songs based on classical melodies.

Lying, though, is nothing new for the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature.

The most hilarious moments come when Dylan gets caught up in his own resplendent language and just can’t stop. “You’re the spoofer, the playactor, the two-faced fraud—the stool pigeon, the scandalmongerer—the prowler and the rat—the human trafficker and the car jacker,” he writes, riffing on Mose Allison’s “Everybody’s Crying Mercy.” Or when he takes the implications of a song to preposterous extremes: the footwear in Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” can “foretell the future, locate lost objects, treat illnesses, identify perpetrators of crimes,” while Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” is “a song of genocide, where you’re led by your nose into a nuclear war.”

The book is a laugh riot, complete with some killer vaudeville-style zingers. “No matter how many chairs you have, you only have one ass,” declares the greatest songwriter of his generation, elsewhere drily suggesting “Enjoy your free-range, cumin-infused, cayenne-dusted heirloom reduction. Sometimes it’s just better to have a BLT and be done with it.” And the secret weapon is the illustrations, packed with old movie posters, vintage ads, and in-jokes that sometimes require a few looks (the “Big Boss Man” entry has Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone on one page, opposite an image of Colonel Tom Parker goofing with Elvis).

But it’s clear that these songs are no joke to Dylan. In a 1997 interview, he said that “I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else.” And it’s the relentless life-or-death stakes and apocalyptic visions, even when obviously being played for dark humor, that sometimes make The Philosophy of Modern Song a bit exhausting. Only a few selections (“Come Rain or Come Shine”) offer any kind of relief from the mood of inescapable brutality or impending doom. Maybe it’s better consumed in small chunks—episodes—rather than all at once.

Ironically, Dylan himself points out this very flaw—the risk of assigning a great artist to one lane and restricting their emotional range. “ Johnny Cash loves being the Man in Black and dresses accordingly,” he writes, “but the truth is he is much more of a well-rounded artist and man. His best records are playful and full of wordplay and humor, miles from the august solemnity of murder ballads, hardscrabble tales and Trent Reznor covers that his fans came to expect.”

The Philosophy of Modern Song

Still, if you pay careful enough attention, some larger vision does begin to emerge, or at least some tactical tips for songwriters. “Novice writers often hide behind filigree,” Dylan writes. “In many cases the artistry is in what is unsaid.” He cautions against “the trap of easy rhymes” (as avoided in the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion”) and explains how Vic Damone’s “On the Street Where You Live” is “all about the three-syllable rhyme: street before, feet before, heart of town, part of town, bother me, rather be.”

At age 81, Dylan has spent much of his life batting away analyses of how his personal life informs his songwriting, and here he notes the limitations of autobiographical lyrics. “Sometimes when songwriters write from their own lives, the results can be so specific, other people can’t connect to them. Putting melodies to diaries doesn’t guarantee a heartfelt song.” (In a clever chess move, he adds that “Knowing a singer’s life story doesn’t particularly help your understanding of a song.”)

As with the “Theme Time” shows, when it seems Dylan is most purely focused on music is when his own story rings most real. “Being a writer is not something one chooses to do,” he says. “It’s something you just do and sometimes people stop and notice.” Digging into Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” Dylan asserts that “The thing about being on the road is that you’re not bogged down by anything. Not even bad news. You give pleasure to other people and you keep your grief to yourself.”

One way to consider Bob Dylan’s career is as a life-long project exploring American music of all kinds. It explains such curious ventures as his Christmas album or his three volumes of Frank Sinatra material. Having already worked through folk, rock, blues, and country music, it makes his gospel period almost inevitable. The Philosophy of Modern Song brings it (almost) all under one roof, with observations, details, and asides to be chewed on, sudden blazing insights to be found, again and again.

“Music is built in time as surely as a sculptor or welder works in physical space,” Dylan writes. And having worked on this book for a dozen years (he claims) and put more than five dozen songs under the microscope one way or another, he concludes that “The more you study music, the less you understand it.” All he can offer up is that “an inexplicable thing happens when words are set to music. The miracle is in their union…People keep trying to turn music into a science, but in science one and one will always be two. Music, like all art, including the art of romance, tells us time and time again that one plus one, in the best of circumstances, equals three.”

And that right there is no lie.

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All 66 Songs Bob Dylan Writes About in ‘Philosophy of Modern Song’ Book Revealed: From Ray Charles to the Clash, Cher and the Eagles

By Chris Willman

Chris Willman

Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic

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Bob Dylan was announced earlier this year as having written separate appreciations of more than 60 different songs for his forthcoming book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song.” Now, the names of all 66 songs he wrote about have been revealed, thanks to the dissemination of a table-of-contents page for the highly anticipated book, which comes out in early November via Simon & Schuster. (Read the full list below.)

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He plays some favorites among recording artists, if not necessarily songwriters themselves. There are four songs associated with Elvis Presley (“Money Honey,” “Blue Moon,” “Viva Las Vegas”), three made popular by Ray Charles (“Come Rain or Come Shine,” “I Got a Woman,” “You Don’t Know Me”) and two from the Frank Sinatra catalog (“Strangers in the Night,” “Without a Song”).

The oldest song on the list is Stephen Foster’s “Nelly Was a Lady,” written in 1849, followed by “The Whiffenpoof Song” from the early 1900s. Blues, R&B and hillbilly songs from the first half of the 20th century figure in heavily. But the majority of songs are from the ’50s through ’70s, a golden age for rock, pop, soul and country. He dips into the punk/new wave era for Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up” and the Clash’s “London Calling.” The two most recent songs on the list are “It Doesn’t Hurt Anymore,” recorded by Regina Belle in 1989, and Warren Zevon’s “Dirty Life and Times,” from his 2003 farewell album “The Wind.”

The chapter on “Pump It Up” could be an interesting one, since Costello freely admits it was inspired in part by Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” so it’ll be interesting to see whether the debt is acknowledged as part of the tribute.

Following is a list of song titles that are chapter titles in Dylan’s forthcoming book. The artists most associated with each song are listed in parentheses. It remains to be established whether Dylan will only consider Nina Simone’s original version of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” or bring up the Animals’ or even Costello’s, for that matter. It’s likely the original Ernie K-Doe record of “A Certain Girl” that he loves, but given his affection for Warren Zevon, the latter artist’s cover version could come in for a mention, for all we know. Much more remains to be revealed when Dylan’s essays go public come November.

“Detroit City” (Bobby Bare)   “Pump It Up” (Elvis Costello & the Attractions)   “Without a Song” (Frank Sinatra)   “Take Me From This Garden of Evil” (Jimmy Wages)   “There Stands the Glass” (Webb Pierce)   “Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me” (Billy Joe Shaver)   “Tutti Frutti” (Little Richard)   “Money Honey” (Elvis Presley)   “My Generation” (The Who)   “Jesse James” (Harry McClintock)   “Poor Little Fool” (Ricky Nelson)   “Pancho and Lefty” (Townes Van Zandt)   “The Pretender” (Jackson Browne)   “Mack the Knife” (Bobby Darin)   “The Whiffenpoof Song” (Rudy Vallee)   “You Don’t Know Me” (Ray Charles)   “Ball of Confusion” (The Temptations)   “Poison Love” (Johnnie & Jack)   “Beyond the Sea” (Bobby Darin)   “On the Road Again” (Willie Nelson)   “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” (Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes)   “The Little White Cloud That Cried” (Johnnie Ray)   “El Paso” (Marty Robbins)   “Nelly Was a Lady” (Stephen Foster)   “Cheaper to Keep Her” (Johnnie Taylor)   “I Got a Woman” (Ray Charles)   “CIA Man” (The Fugs)   “On The Street Where You Live” (From “My Fair Lady”)   “Truckin'” (The Grateful Dead)   “Ruby, Are You Mad?” (The Osborne Brothers)   “Old Violin” (Johnny Paycheck)   “Volare” (Domenico Modugno)   “London Calling” (The Clash)   “Your Cheatin’ Heart” (Hank Williams)   “Blue Bayou” (Roy Orbison)

“Midnight Rider” (The Allman Brothers Band)

“Blue Suede Shoes” (Carl Perkins)

“My Prayer” (The Platters)

“Dirty Life and Times” (Warren Zevon)

“Doesn’t Hurt Anymore” (Regina Belle)

“Key to the Highway” (Little Walter)

“Everybody Cryin’ Mercy” (Mose Allison)

“War” (Edwin Starr)

“Big River” (Johnny Cash)

“Feel So Good” (Shirley & Lee)

“Blue Moon” (Elvis Presley)

“Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves” (Cher)

“Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy” (Uncle Dave Macon)

“It’s All in the Game” (Tommy Edwards)

“I’ve Always Been Crazy” (Waylon Jennings)

“Witchy Woman” (Eagles)

“Big Boss Man” (Jimmy Reed)

“Long Tall Sally” (Little Richard)

“Old and Only in the Way” (Charlie Poole)

“Black Magic Woman” (Santana)

“By the Time I Get to Phoenix” (Glen Campbell)

“Come On-a My House” (Rosemary Clooney)

“Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” (Johnny Cash)

“Come Rain or Come Shine” (Ray Charles)

“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” (Nina Simone)

“Strangers in the Night” (Frank Sinatra)

“Viva Las Vegas” (Elvis Presley)

“Saturday Night at the Movies” (The Drifters)

“Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” (Pete Seeger)

“Where or When” (Dion and the Belmonts)

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