When the young Robert Zimmerman discovered folk music in the late 1950s, he was transfixed. It seemed weightier and more serious than anything he was hearing on the radio. 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. Having created a new persona and invented a wandering minstrel backstory he became a figurehead for the folk movement, a messianic singer. He then spent the next 50-odd years playing with, and gradually unpicking, this persona. Now in his 80s, Dylan wants to bring us closer than ever to his teenage self, the kid soaking up everything he heard on the radio in his bedroom, before he became the masked character with seemingly biblical powers.
The Philosophy of Modern Song features 66 short essays on songs Dylan loves, beautifully illustrated with shots of old American record shops, casinos, fairgrounds, movie theatres and record-pressing plants. Here he is, guard down, eulogising Frank Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night. It’s unlikely, but it’s wonderful.
