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In case you hadn’t heard, Bob Dylan is not only still alive, but has released yet another set of songs; this one is called “Modern Times”. Long story short, this is a fine collection. Masterpiece? Who knows; these questions are sometimes fun to discuss and sometimes annoying; at this moment, I don’t care. Fact is, IMO he’s had more than a few great albums in his long career (I’ve got 20 Dylan sets on my Ipod) and this might turn out to be one of them. Test of time and all that; I will say that his songs have become so personal as to be uncoverable, but that’s been true on and off for a long time (and doesn’t stop people from trying). It’s hard to imagine a Peter, Paul & Mary reincarnation covering something like “Spirit on the Water” (I do credit Joan Osborne for doing a nice job on “To Make You Feel My Love”).

However you want to categorize this CD, it’s solid work – well-crafted and intriguing songs and a crackerjack band (I love the word “crackerjack”) that can play anything from Chuck Berry’s country blues rock to cowboy waltz to John Lee Hooker/Slim Harpo boogie to early thirties crooner ballads with a Hawaiian tinge – all of which come out of Dylan’s encyclopedic knowledge of American popular music, particularly what Greil Marcus famously called “the old weird America”. I just loaded a Louvin Brothers disc onto the Ipod™ (“Tragic Songs of Life”), so I know just what he meant (BTW, anything by Ira & Charlie Louvin, a key influence on folks like the Everly Brothers and Emmylou Harris, is highly recommended).

OK – it’s a short while later, and I’ve been loading traditional country and folk, including an anthology of the New Lost City Ramblers (“Out Standing In Their Field”), and I thought “I bet they’ve got some weird stuff on there”. So I played “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake”. Bingo. You want to know what Marcus was talking about? Listen to a copy of this song (also performed by the Stanley Brothers and probably others as well). But I digress.

There’s an excellent article in this week’s New Yorker (“Yes, the New Yorker!”) in which Lewis Menand reviews a recent book containing the collected interviews of Bob Dylan. The book sounds reasonably interesting (although if you want to read anything about Dylan, read his “Chronicles” – which is genuinely fascinating and fun – and David Hajdu’s tale of Dylan, Richard Farina, and the Fabulous Baez Sisters, “Positively Fourth Street”), but what makes the review worth reading is late in the article when Menand talks about Dylan’s singing. It’s worth reading because he and I are in total agreement (ha): Dylan is a great singer; yep – you heard that right - not just decent or good or very good – great.

His command of timbre is awesome, as you can hear by playing an Ipod™ shuffled random Dylan playlist; some of it is age, but plenty of it is there almost from the get-go. More important, and here Menand and I are as one, is Dylan’s phrasing. He can swing, he can rock, he can do talking blues, country blues, delta blues, torch, crooning (and that didn’t start with “Love and Theft”; just listen to “Nashville Skyline”) and more. Each of these styles has a different way of phrasing and Dylan does them all.

It’s really what makes his songs work, after all. No one, no matter how mellifluous their timbre, can make a Dylan song work better than Bob. When you hear his lines in your head – and there are so many good ones – you hear them in his tonality and especially with his phrasing. I was listening to “Visions of Johanna” from “Blonde on Blonde” today, one of my all-time favorite songs of his, and when he came to the line “Mona Lisa must’a had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles”, I was blown away by how powerfully he phrases that line – where he puts his stresses, which words he chops and which ones he chooses to stretch out, how he plays the words like a jazz soloist over and around the melody while the band comps. It’s not easy listening, but ultimately it’s the reason his rhetoric – even at its most surreal – sticks in your mind. He’s singer as orator, as persuader, as politician of the personal. When it comes to his songs, Dylan is one slick salesman. And I think I’m still digressing.

Bottom line, “Modern Times” is Dylan worth savoring. He sings about spirit and flesh, the creator and the created; sometimes he's Adam, sometimes he's Jesus, sometimes he's Yahweh, and sometimes he's Cain - but he's always our Bobby, just walkin' down the line.

And when you listen to it, and I hope you will, don’t just get carried away by the Bob the barker; give props to the solid band and pay more attention to the singer’s phrasing, less to the specific meaning of a given string of words. Remember - no one ever asked Louis Armstrong what the intro to “West End Blues” really meant. It’s what was in his head, heart, and soul - laid out for all who can to dig it. Dylan’s songs should be dug in the same way.

p.s. For next week’s assignment, I’d like 500 words on the meaning of “dig” in its hipster aspect. Extra credit for any appropriate quotes from Lord Buckley.