![]() He then spent the next 50-odd years playing with, and gradually unpicking, this persona. Having created a new persona and invented a wandering minstrel backstory he became a figurehead for the folk movement, a messianic singer. Overnight, he shunned his old favourites Little Richard and Fats Domino for singers of songs that he considered to be deeper, sadder, more despairing and more triumphant than regular pop music. It seemed weightier and more serious than anything he was hearing on the radio. When the young Robert Zimmerman discovered folk music in the late 1950s, he was transfixed. "It's what a song makes you feel about your own life that's important." The passage on Carl Perkins's "Blue Suede Shoes" pulls this off brilliantly, drawing a line from 1950s rockabilly through the past four decades of hip-hop and giving voice to the aggression required to protect one's "point of pride": "If you want to live and know how to live, you'll stay off my shoes." Chronicles: Volume Two this is not, but there's plenty of unfiltered Dylan his entry on Johnnie Taylor's "Cheaper to Keep Her" swerves into a riotous screed on the divorce litigation industry, while his ode to the Grateful Dead's "Truckin' " praises Bob Weir's performance in a way that fans might describe Dylan himself: "The guy singing the song acts and talks like who he is, and not the way others would want him to talk and act." There's no end to the joy of joining this elusive and voracious artist in musical appreciation. Across 66 chapters-each delving into a song recorded between 19-Dylan considers what a particular number might mean to listeners of many stripes: "Knowing a singer's life story doesn't particularly help your understanding of a song," he writes. Nobel-winning songwriter Dylan (Chronicles: Volume One) offers a marvelous survey of the recordings he loves. ![]() ![]() In 2016, Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." In 2008, the Pulitzer Prize jury awarded him a special citation for "his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." In 2012, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. In 1988, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. ![]() He has received numerous awards including eleven Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award. He has published poetry and prose including a collection entitled Tarantula in 1971, a memoir entitled Chronicles: Volume One in 2004, and The Lyrics: 1961-2012 in 2016. His songs include Blowin' in the Wind, The Times They Are a-Changin', and Like a Rolling Stone. He has recorded 38 studio albums including Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks, Oh Mercy, Time Out Of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times. He emerged on the New York music scene in 1961. Author Notesīob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on in Duluth, Minnesota. 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. 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. Running throughout the book are a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work's transcendence. And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny. These essays are written in Dylan's unique prose. 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. 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. The audio is narrated by an all-star lineup including Bob Dylan, Jeff Bridges, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Oscar Isaac, Helen Mirren, Rita Moreno, Sissy Spacek, Alfre Woodard, Jeffrey Wright, and Renée Zellweger!ĭylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. 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.
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