As I have read through Howard Sounes’ excellent Bob Dylan biography, Down the Highway, I have found myself compelled to listen to and explore all facets of Dylan’s catalog. Easy enough (and pleasant enough) to do with the canon, and certainly so with his more recent work, but what about that soft, saggy middle?

I came to Dylan, like many probably did, with Time Out of Mind. Yes, I had some of the early classics, but they were just that: classics. I didn’t consider him a valid, contemporary artist. Rather, he was a bona fide member of the oldies circuit who kept cranking out albums because he didn’t know any better. But with Time Out of Mind, I realized there was more – much, much more – to this artist.

It’s a daunting task, trying to keep up with Dylan. I filled in holes as I was compelled by outside influences. Reading about his Christian phase led me to Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love. The Bootleg series entry on the Rolling Thunder Revue led me to Desire. But there were several albums that I simply had ignored, from Knocked Out Loaded through Under the Red Sky. Oh Mercy doesn’t really belong on this list, as I bought the boxed set of SACD reissues several years ago that included it, and I fell in love with it.

What remains are three albums –Knocked Out Loaded, Down in the Groove and Under the Red Sky. They are pretty universally panned, and even charitable fans have a hard time being nice to more than a song or two on each. Why are these so troubled? Reading Sounes’ book, you could point to personal problems, drinking, financial woes or any number of issues. But to me it seems that a lack of band cohesion might be at least partly to blame.

I hit upon this while scrolling through the credits on Down in the Groove at bobdylan.com. I noticed that the bass on one song was played by Kip Winger. For those who don’t know, he is the titular leader of the hair metal band Winger. Why was Winger in the studio that day? I’m sure there’s a logical explanation, but that doesn’t make it any less strange that he joined Eric Clapton, Ron Wood, Mitchell Froom and others on “Had a Dream About You, Baby.”

Looking through the credits for those three albums, I was struck by how completely random some of the band configurations were. Dylan long has benefitted from throwing curve balls – changing keys, altering lyrics, etc. I’m sure the presence of some of these folks brought a spark to the proceedings. But there’s also something to be said for assembling a whipsmart band to tear through a batch of songs and provide a common thread through them.

What follows is a list of the eight songs that have the strangest batch of performers in Dylan’s catalog… according to me. Others, I’m very sure, would have differing opinions.

Under The Red Sky

“Wiggle Wiggle”: Bob Dylan – guitar, vocals; Slash – guitar; David Lindley – guitar; Jamie Muhoberac – organ; Randy Jackson – bass; Kenny Aronoff – drums

“Born In Time”: Bob Dylan – accordion, vocals; David Crosby – background vocals; Bruce Hornsby – piano; Robben Ford – guitar; Randy Jackson – bass; Kenny Aronoff – Drums; Paulinho Da Costa – percussion

“2 X 2″: Bob Dylan – acoustic guitar, vocals; David Crosby – background vocals; Elton John – piano; David Lindley – bouzouki; Randy Jackson – bass; Kenny Aronoff – Drums; Paulinho Da Costa – percussion

Down In The Groove

“Sally Sue Brown”: Bob Dylan – vocals, guitar; Steve Jones – guitar; Myron Grombacher – drums; Paul Simonon – bass; Kevin Savigar – keyboards; Madelyn Quebec – vocals; Bobby King, Willie Green – background vocals

“Had A Dream About You, Baby”: Bob Dylan – vocals, guitar; Eric Clapton – guitar; Ron Wood – bass; Kip Winger – bass; Beau Hill – keyboards; Mitchell Froom – keyboards; Henry Spinetti – drums

Knocked Out Loaded

“You Wanna Ramble”: Bob Dylan – guitar; T. Bone Burnett – guitar; James Jamerson Jr. – bass; Al Kooper – keyboards; Raymond Lee Pounds – drums; Carol Dennis, Madelyn Quebec, Muffy Hendrix, Annette May Thomas – background vocals

“Maybe Someday”: Bob Dylan – guitar; Mike Campbell – guitar; Howie Epstein – bass; Don Heffington – drums; Steve Douglas – saxophone; Steve Madaio – trumpet; Annette May Thomas, Carol Dennis, Madelyn Quebec, Elisecia Wright, Queen Esther Marrow, Peggi Blu –background vocals

“Under Your Spell”: Bob Dylan – guitar; Dave Stewart – guitar; Clem Burke – drums; Patrick Seymour – keyboards; John McKenzie – bass; Muffy Hendrix, Carol Dennis, Queen Esther Marrow, Elisecia Wright, Madelyn Quebec – background vocals

I came across a copy of Bob Dylan’s Saved at the local public library a couple of weeks ago, and it was the catalyst that led me to a reassessment of Dylan’s trio of so-called Christian albums, Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love.

Thirty years after the fact, these albums don’t feel like the radical departure they were depicted as at the time. That’s not to say I wouldn’t have felt that way – a sense of betrayal, really – at the time. But rather that the value of hindsight affords me the chance to hear these in the full context of Dylan’s catalog. With that context, these feel less like Dylan allowing his talents to be diminished as he channeled his new-found faith and more like an artist who was burned out finding a new subject that positively revitalized him.

I won’t get into the particulars of Dylan’s conversion – you can read much more about it elsewhere – but will instead focus on the music he made during this period. After the Rolling Thunder Revue, which seems like the culmination of his second great phase, Dylan seemed to be searching for a new direction. Street Legal, while containing its share of strong mid-period songs, seems to be an album by an artist searching for a larger narrative. On its follow-up, Slow Train Coming, Dylan has found it.

The album is clearly the strongest of the three Christian albums, as a Dylan still in full ownership of his songwriting prowess brought those powers to bear on these new lyrical pursuits. “Gotta Serve Somebody,” “Precious Angel” and “I Believe in You” are a strong 1-2-3 punch to start the album, the middle of those about as gorgeous a song as Dylan has recorded. There are clunkers here – “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” is a misguided bit of comic relief, and “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking” feels a bit hamfisted among its neighbors – but this is a potent album.

Saved is the most overtly religious of the three albums, as Dylan’s faith seems to be in full flower. This is as close as he got to a gospel album, from the praise-worthy title track to the quietly insistent gem “Pressing On.” The singer’s passion elevates some of his most pedestrian songwriting, the fiery performances making this a real joy to hear.

Shot of Love feels like the other end of the bell curve that started with Slow Train Coming. Where that album signaled the ascent of Dylan’s faith, this one records its recession, at least from a musical standpoint. The religious content is still there, of course, but the music is more interesting and thus not as beholden on the singer’s delivery for their success. That he continues to sing with verve that practically oozes a focused intent certainly delivers these songs to a place otherwise unobtainable. Classics like “Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” and “Every Grain of Sand” make this otherwise uneven album worth hearing.

Ultimately, these three albums are full of love songs. The problem for some is the subject of that feeling. One can try to divorce them from that source as they listen, but Dylan’s passion is difficult to ignore.

Not everything here is good, but the best of it is fairly outstanding. A playlist assembled from many of the songs mentioned above makes a 10-track collection that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with nearly anything outside of Dylan’s ’63-’66 heyday.

Perhaps John Jurgensen is just trying to get a jump on the inevitable 70 birthday-related retrospectives and analysis that will accompany Bob Dylan’s next birthday in May. How else to explain his attempted takedown of Dylan in Friday’s Wall Street Journal. The piece, “When to Leave the Stage,” supposes that Dylan is too old, his voice too far gone, to justify continued performing.

“For people of influence in any walk of life, from corporate leaders to sports stars, the question of when to leave the stage is a crucial one. Do you go out at the top of your game, giving up any shot at further glory? Or do you dig in until the end, at the risk of tarnishing a distinguished career?” he writes. It’s a valid question, and one certainly worth discussing when it comes to Dylan. But his answer is flawed.

Rebuttals to his piece are several, but I’ll focus on one here: the notion that Dylan might somehow tarnish his legacy with subpar shows well past his prime. Jurgensen himself answers the question before it is asked, writing, “After 50 years in music, his place in the pantheon is unassailable.” Yet, he goes on write, “Firing the debate is his status as the ultimate music icon, the caretaker of a body of work that, many would agree, stands in contrast to his current sound,” going on to wonder, “if he plows on indefinitely, could the accumulating career lows undermine the highs?”

Anyone who asks such questions doesn’t understand Dylan or his music, for the artist is perhaps the greatest example of one whose art is never finished. Recordings capture moments in time. And these are truly moments. Any listen to the outtakes from a session reveals that Dylan attempts songs several different ways before deciding on one to release. Listen to the versions of “Mississippi” on the late period odds and sods collection Tell Tale Signs. All are different, all are wonderful. There may be one “official” version of a song, but only in the marketplace; not in Dylan’s mind.

As Greil Marcus wrote in a review of the Japanese-only release, Live 1961-2000 – Thirty-Nine Years of Great Concert Performances, “Then comes ‘Born in Time,’ and you figure it’s time to hit the restroom. There’s a long line, though, and you lose out on ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe.’ It will never be sung and played quite like it is this night in 1975. You missed it. Or would have, if this record didn’t exist.” (Taken from Marcus’ exhaustive, fascinating new book, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010.)

A live Dylan performance today offers a similar opportunity. He’ll never play the same song the same way again. You may not like this version of that song (or any song, as Jurgensen’s reports of mass walk-outs are to be believed), but someone else might. One fan laments these changes, telling Jurgensen, “What you’re used to feeling from his music just isn’t there.” Another, however, follows one disappointment-fueled show with another, declaring, “Compared to last time? 180 degrees!”

The newish book Advanced Genius Theory by Jason Hartley offers some related food for thought. The book posits that advanced artists — those like Dylan, Lou Reed and Neil Young — who have alienated fans along the way by seemingly betraying what they initially stood for, are actually too far ahead of the rest of us to be understood. The theory is more complex (and convoluted and, ultimately, indefensible) than that, but it sparks interesting debate. In writing about Dylan, Hartley rightly argues that “(Their fans) look to artist to make the sacrifices that they are afraid to make themselves. In Dylan’s case he was expected to be loyal to a style of music so a bunch of white college kids could feel as if they were making a difference.”

Forty years later, that is still happening, to a degree, as people look to Dylan to help them recapture something to which his music contributed. But Dylan has moved on, even as these people seek to remain in place. “Don’t Look Back” wasn’t just a catchy lyric, it was clearly a defining statement of purpose.

Yes, it’s understandable that someone could be disappointed by Dylan’s voice — Jurgensen cleverly calls it “a scatting Cookie Monster,” while I referred to it as a “compromised croak” in a review of an October 2007 show. But there were transcendent moments in the show I saw, and, I’m sure in every show Dylan has performed since. To suggest that he should hang it up is to suggest that fans willing to pay their money down for a ticket should be denied the chance of witnessing their own transcendence. Had Dylan listened to the calls from detractors in the mid-1980s, we wouldn’t have Oh Mercy, Time Out of Mind or “Love and Theft,” and if he heeds this new batch of naysaying, who knows what we’ll miss?

So, there was a bit of discussion in the comments of my last post about Bob Dylan, where it was suggested that I didn’t know what I was talking about. After reading those comments, I have only one thing to say: Guilty.

That confession comes with a caveat, however. The people commenting, who all obviously know more about Dylan than I do, surely don’t know as much about Dylan as others. And those others are probably trumped by some uber-fan who has a lock of the singer’s hair encased in a clear Lucite box in a special shrine in their home dubbed “Highway 61 Re-Revisted.”

The point is that with someone like Dylan, it’s almost impossible to be a definitive expert. As such, I wonder if people look at the sheer volume of his work, the twists and turns, the obscure and imponderable, and just say, “forget it.” That’s a long-winded way of asking if an artist like Dylan still picks up new fans.

I first heard Dylan, I’m sure, as a teen, when the local AOR station would play “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” This would have been the early to mid-1980s, the Empire Burlesque and Knocked Out Loaded era. This was not exactly Dylan’s best foot forward in terms for forging a lasting relationship with an impressionable young music fan. To be honest, I still have yet to hear either album in its entirety, and my main recollection about them is the Rolling Stone review of Knocked Out Loaded from Anthony DeCurtis (though less scathing than I remember): “[I]t suggests Dylan’s utter lack of artistic direction. Less bad than pointless, Knocked Out Loaded will prove most satisfying to those content to expect the very least from it.” Suffice to say, I passed.  (But, I did cut out the review on the back of the page (probably R.E.M. or the Replacements), and thus have seen it more than might seem normal over the years.

The first time I actively sought out Dylan, it was still in a passive way. Out of college a couple of years, but still living in the college town (as I do today), I came across a box of LPs deemed unworthy for resale that were sitting outside my favorite record store. The person who had lugged them up and then been turned away obviously didn’t feel like taking them home. So, I pawed through and came away with copies of Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing it All Back Home and John Wesley Harding that remain in my collection today. They still sound great; they likely were rejected because there was plenty of stock on hand.

These LPs were a revelation. John Wesley Harding hit the hardest, oddly enough. I was listening to a lot of alt-country (Jayhawks, Uncle Tupelo, et al), and the more hushed, pastoral tone of the album grabbed me. It wasn’t long before the others did, too. It was around this time that Dylan issued Time Out of Mind, his first universally lauded album in years (keeping in mind the guarded optimism that greeted Oh Mercy, as I recall). It wasn’t necessarily what I wanted out of Dylan at the time, but it hit me at the right moment, and I spent a lot of time with the record.

From there, I actively sought out his music, getting older work as I was able, and keeping up with everything new. I started to dabble with bootlegs, but that felt like a fool’s errand because I often didn’t know the original versions of the bootlegged material, so I had no idea why they were different or better.

To be honest, I’m still on that path. I keep up with everything new, and continue to work my way backward as time, access and my budget permit. It’s difficult, to be sure. I’m a huge music fan, someone who listens to 300-400 new albums in one form or another each year. Assuming that I like a portion of those enough for repeat listens, and still listen to favorites from past years, that means my time to spend with something like Empire Burlesque (which I own and like) or Knocked Out Loaded (which I don’t), is limited. It is hard work being a relatively new Dylan fan (if anything going on 15 years can be considered “new”).

I know I’m not alone, and neither is Dylan. Any prolific artist with a long career faces the same problem. Dylan has been aided by the Bootleg Series, which not only offers attractive entry points for new fans, but generates new interest from the media (More has been written about Dylan in the last two months in the lead up to the issue of the ninth collection in the Bootleg Series than about the reunion after a 15-year layoff of my favorite band, Guided by Voices, for example, let alone about the new work from any hip indie band with a 9-plus rating on Pitchfork).

Not that I’m wishing for this to happen anytime soon, but at some point, Dylan will stop making new music, and Columbia/Sony will quit unearthing things to release (though, if the 30-years-gone Elvis is any indication, I might not outlast those efforts), and I can begin to catch up properly. Until then, I’ll continue to muddle along, and as I do, I’ll make  discoveries. Some of these (OK, most of these) will be things discovered long ago by the people who have invested significantly more time in the artist than I have, and some might actually be original enough to be worth sharing. The discussion that rose up over that last post taught me more than I would have learned without it, so I’ll consider myself encouraged to keep it up.

The official release of a live Bob Dylan performance from 1963, In Concert Brandeis University 1963, affords listeners the opportunity to better chart the singer’s evolution from talented yet tentative folksinger to seasoned concert performer in two years. That evolution, viewed in hindsight, would seem to be an important catalyst that drove his explosive move into electric music and beyond.

While dedicated Dylan-philes have been able to compare and contrast performances from various periods thanks to bootleg recordings, those unable or unwilling to track down these documents have been less able to do so. But with this new release, Dylan has now officially released live recordings from 1962, 1963 and 1964 (keeping in mind that collections like the Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3 have live tracks from this period as well), and this offer a chance to hear him grow as an artist and performer.

The main difference among these performances is Dylan’s confidence as a performer. On Live at the Gaslight 1962, he seems most intent on getting the songs across. He is seasoned enough not to stumble – though “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” is new enough that mumbles his way through a few lines – but this is a more workmanlike run through the songs. He is singing, not necessarily performing.

By 1963, on the new In Concert Brandeis University 1963, He is performing. There is a confidence. The songs stand on their own, and so Dylan is able augment them with some personality. There is a wink here, as he lets the audience know that a Dylan concert is about more than guitar picking and long strings of words. On Gaslight, the message is the message, so to speak. On Brandeis, the medium – in this case, the singer himself – is as much the message as the songs.

That brings us to The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Live 1964. There is no clean comparison among all of these releases, as there is no song common to all three. However, one can compare Dylan’s performance of “Don’t Think Twice” on Gaslight and 1964 and the performance of “Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues” on Brandeis and 1964 to get a sense of his evolution.

It’s no surprise that 1964 captures the most accomplished Dylan of the three sets. He’s older, wiser and has many more concerts and successes under his belt by this point. On Gaslight, “Don’t Think Twice” is slightly tentative. He’s a young performer trying to remember the words. On 1964, he’s singing a hit, bringing a keening quality to his vocal. His phrasing is pointed, and his harmonica gives the song a richness and depth missing from the earlier version. He is giving a concert, not tossing off a few songs in a club gig.

“Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues” is even more revelatory. Between May 10, 1963, and Oct. 31, 1964, the song has gone from a well-crafted batch of one-liners designed to garner laughs to a pointed critique that is introduced with more personality than on the earlier version. Dylan knows his laugh lines and delivers them like a pro. And while some of this can be chalked up to the improved fidelity on the 1964 performance, it seems clear that Dylan is simply better at putting his songs across. He enunciates more clearly, performs with more verve and variation.

This evolution from confidence to mastery in just two years likely is one factor in Dylan’s decision to embrace rock instrumentation on the album he was conceiving at the time, Bringing it all Back Home. In a way, Dylan had painted himself into a corner. People knew what to expect from him, and he had grown able to deliver it very, very well. In the first of what has become a career pattern, he tackled something new, forcing himself to grow and causing his audience to adapt or fall behind.

Two giants took the unusual step of releasing Christmas albums this fall, and the surprise is who did it better. Was it the sentimental fool with a sweet pop croon who knows his way around traditional music, or the craggy voiced Jew whose music seems to eschew sentiment?

Surprise! In the battle of superstar Christmas albums, it’s no contest: Bob Dylan bests Sting.

The intent of these two discs is different. Dylan surely hopes his disc will bring Christmas cheer, while Sting probably imagines his ideal listener in front of the hearth of a stone castle’s main room sipping a glass of port. Each artist includes 15 songs, and one need look no further than the tracklistings to tell the difference. Dylan includes “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “Winter Wonderland” and “Silver Bells,” while Sting’s tunes come from the likes of Praetorius, Schubert and Bach.

If Sting is good for anything these days, it’s subverting expectations. Solo career tailing off? Cut an album of ancient lute music. Making inroads as a classical artist? Reunite the Police. Fans eager to hear the next thing from that still vital band? Go back to classical music and make the world’s first completely joyless Christmas album.

Sting was sliding down a slippery slope toward irrelevance when he decided to reunite the Police. It was his most purely commercial and calculated move of the last two decades. After that triumphant return, he could have done just about anything. Fans would have loved to see the Police go into the studio, but there was little chance of that. A big rock album from Sting was a possibility, or at least a return to the airy pop he was making in the early 1990s. Instead, he returned to the contemplative, mannered music he was making before the reunion. The result, If On a Winter’s Night…, is an impressive collection of music both new and old (mostly old), but as a Christmas album, it’s a complete dud.

Even those of us who cringe at any bit of treacle in our music can at least tolerate a bit of goodwill and cheer (and sappiness) when it comes to Christmas music. Sting takes the opposite tack, however, offering the perfect soundtrack for the ascetic atheist winter carnival of one. It is at times beautiful, but it doesn’t seem to have a place.

Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart, meanwhile, is the sign of an artist who gets it. No one expected this from Dylan, of course, particularly given the creative hot streak he has been on over the past decade-plus. But, like Sting, Dylan is one who seems to revel in subverting expectations.

Perhaps it is the charitable intent behind the disc (all proceeds go to charity) that steered Dylan in the right direction, or, more likely, it is simply his affection for classic songs. Whatever the cause, he offers spirited and silly takes on some of the best-known (and best-loved) carols. His jaunty performance fits well with the material. The swooning strings and jingle-ready backing singers are a bit much, but Dylan clearly had a vision here, and he executes it to the fullest.

I have been remiss about getting this interview with Steve Wynn posted because I’ve been doing things like… traveling to see Steve Wynn. So, I’ll wrap a review of Wynn’s recent Baseball Project show in Chicago in with this short Q&A about his new self-released CD, Steve Sings Bob.

First up, the Baseball Project. The show was a triple bill, with the BP, the Steve Wynn IV and the Minus 5. However, it was all the same band, with Wynn on guitar and vox, Scott McCaughey also on guitar and vocals, Peter Buck on bass and Linda Pitmon (Wynn’s wife and drummer in the Miracle 3) on drums. They decided to play one big show rather than separate band sets, and that was a wise choice. They opened with the Dream Syndicate’s “That’s What You Always Say,” which set a nice tone: laid back but with blisteringly good guitars. From there it was a mix of tunes from Wynn’s latest, disc, Crossing Dragon Bridge (“Manhattan Fault Line”) Dream Syndicate (a scorching “Medicine Show” and “Days of Wine and Roses”) and even Gutterball (“Trial Separation Blues.”) The first hour-long set closed with “Amphetamine,” which was so good I feared the second set couldn’t top it. Yes, there was some fall off, but not much as, McCaughey dominated that set with a sprinkling of Minus 5 tunes new and old.

The Baseball Project songs were the highlight of the night. “Harvey Haddix” got an update to include Mark Buehrle’s recent perfect game (with a nice, harmonious bridge to note his accomplishment), while “Past Time” smoked and “The Yankee Flipper” had a few heartier souls in the crowd saluting with their middle fingers raised high. A new Baseball Project song was debuted, “Tony,” which tells of player Tony Conigliaro, who was hit by a pitch in the eye.

All in all it was a fantastic show that reaffirmed my fandom of everyone involved. Strangest was seeing multimillionaire Peter Buck quietly playing bass on stage in a small bar. He’s surely the richest person to set foot on that stage, which is testament to how much he must love playing live.

The band pulled out one cover: Neil Young’s “Revolution Blues,” passing on the chance to cover Bob Dylan and give me a less clunky segue into my interview with Wynn. Oh well.

Wynn has performed several Dylan songs over the years, and recently decided to gather a bunch of them on CD. The result, Steve Sings Bob, is a limited-edition (of 300) collection of Dylan covers from 1982 to present. Most are live, some more polished than others, but all are good and fully fitting the spirit of the material. In the liner notes on his site, Wynn shares one interesting story about “Blind Willie McTell.” It was recorded by the latter-day Dream Syndicate in 1988 on a radio show, and released on a Bucketful of Brains magazine flexi the next year, “marking the first time the song had officially seen the light of day, a few years before Dylan’s version was released on the first of his bootleg series. We even had to get the permission of his publishing staff to put out our version before he did.”

The tracklist:

1. Blind Willie McTell (The Dream Syndicate)
2. Positively 4th Street (Steve Wynn and Loose Change)
3. Watching The River Flow (Steve Wynn and Friends)
4. Honest With Me (Steve Wynn & the Miracle 3)
5. Knockin’ On Heavens Door (Steve Wynn with the Alejandro Escovedo Band)
6. All Along The Watchtower (The Dream Syndicate)
7. Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar (Steve Wynn Quintet)
8. Outlaw Blues (The Dream Syndicate)
9. Gotta Serve Somebody (Hazel Motes)
10. Like A Rolling Stone (Steve Wynn and Jason Victor)

I asked Wynn a few questions about the project, and he graciously responded, “from the middle of a van rolling across northern Washington….”

TIRBD: You’ve done a few covers here and there, but nothing to compare with the number of Dylan songs you’ve done. What is the appeal of his music from an interpreter’s standpoint?

SW: Well, the most obvious answer is that he’s a great songwriter with an incredible catalog of amazing songs. But, beyond that, the songs are usually easy to learn and leave a lot of room for interpretation (witness his own wide varieties of takes on his own material over the years). It’s also a common language for musicians — almost everyone loves at least one period of Dylan or another so it’s easy to name a song when you’re looking for a quick cover and know that there HAS to be one Dylan song in common between the various memory banks of the guys on stage.

What challenges do you face when tackling Dylan’s work?

That’s easy: remembering the words. Every song has at least 5 or 6 verses. I was joking to the band before our Italian show (Steve Sings Bob in Ravenna last month) that they had the easy job. And it’s true. You can learn the music on the spot but it’s not easy to fake the lyrics. Fortunately, so many of his songs are firmly embedded in my DNA.

Were there songs you’ve done that you wanted to include where you couldn’t find a decent recording?

Not really. In fact, my favorite song on the CD was the version of “Gotta Serve Somebody” that I recorded with my “punk gospel” band Hazel Motes. And that version is VERY lo-fi, just an audience recording.

Is there a favorite Dylan song that you don’t feel you can pull off?

I really wanted to do “Highlands.” All 18 minutes of it. And I will definitely do it one day. But I’ll need a teleprompter or a music stand.

A fortuitous browse through the CD rack at the local library brought me to Bryan Ferry’s fantastic album of Bob Dylan covers, 2007′s Dylanesque, and had me thinking this weekend about the phenomenon of Dylan covers.

What I decided, and what I would be happy to be proven wrong about in the comments, is that Dylan has already written his last great song when measured solely by the stick of cover versions. That song, of course, is “Make You Feel My Love,” from Time Out of Mind.Ferry covers it — and 10 other songs drawn from all along the continuum of Dylan’s career — on Dylanesque, putting him in very good company. From Joan Osborne and Billy Joel to Trisha Yearwood and her husband, Garth Brooks, some very big names have cut the song.

The same can be said, to a certain extent, for other Time Out of Mind tracks. The White Stripes and Duke Robillard have performed and/or recorded “Love Sick,” Alabama 3, Steve Forbert and Robyn Hitchcock have tackled “Trying to Get to Heaven,” and Jimmy LaFave has recorded “Not Dark Yet.”

After that, the significant covers are fewer and farther in between. Some of that can be attributed to time. Modern Times came out just three years ago, and the new Together Through Life obviously hasn’t been out long enough to see much cover action. That brings up two points, however. The first is that Love and Theft has been out for eight years, and other artists have sown little interest in covering its songs. Sheryl Crow did “Mississippi,” of course, before Dylan did it himself. Maria Muldaur has recorded “Moonlight,” and Ryan Adams has attempted “Po’ Boy” in concert. But that’s pretty much it.

The other point is that in Dylan’s prime, artists didn’t wait for his versions to come out before cutting their own. His songs were shopped around prior to release, and covers would come out before, during and after the release of his own. Today, that doesn’t seem to be happening.

Why? It’s certainly not because the quality of Dylan’s output has diminished; far from it. I believe it has to do with the kind of songs Dylan is turning out. “Make You Feel My Love,” Dylan’s endearingly creaky delivery on Time Out of Mind aside, is a classic love song, easily interpreted. “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” “Thunder on the Mountain” and “If You Ever Go to Houston” would be much more difficult to cover. The right artist could do them justice, but a pleasant voice and a crack studio band wouldn’t turn them into hits the way they could earlier Dylan material.

While this has always somewhat been the case, it seems as if Dylan’s best interpreter these days is again Dylan himself. Ferry’s album seems to offer proof. While the restrained — and unruffled — menace of his cover of “Positively Fourth Street,” for example, brings something new to the song, it can’t compete with Dylan’s seething, spitting rage.

Now, as Dylan seems content (or perhaps “energized” is a better term) to use his albums to recreate the sound he spent 100 shows exploring on his “Theme Time Radio Hour” show, other artists are looking elsehwere for cover material.