Having Dylan pick your song for inclusion in The Philosophy of Modern Song doesn’t necessary mean he’s going to heap praise upon you, and here he gets in a few good digs at Elvis Costello. But he also had a heavy dose of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues.’” (“ Pump It Up,” Elvis Costello) “At the point of ‘Pump It Up,’ he obviously had been listening to Springsteen too much. The best songs are the ones we can connect to our own lives, whether they’re soundtracking important moments or simply conjuring certain emotions that we can latch onto. This is probably at least partly an excuse from the notoriously cagey Dylan to continue offering little-to-no insight into his own personal life or creative process, but it does also hammer home an important truth about music. It’s what a song makes you feel about your own life that’s important.” (“ Pump It Up,” Elvis Costello) Frank Sinatra’s feelings over Ava Gardner allegedly inform ‘I’m a Fool to Want You,’ but that’s just trivia. “Knowing a singer’s life story doesn’t particularly help your understanding of a song. With that in mind, we’ve rounded up the most interesting lines - the sublime, the cringe-y and the downright absurd - from The Philosophy of Modern Song to examine a little further below. So no, this is by no means a comprehensive study of contemporary music, but it is unmistakably Dylan, full of devastating turns of phrase and evocative ruminations on the moods each song captures. Despite “modern” being in the title, only two of the 66 songs included were released in the 21st century, and the majority of them were written in the 1950s. The book sees Dylan offering up his thoughts and observations on 66 songs by other artists. At times, it’s downright gorgeous at other times, it’s deeply frustrating, and through it all, it’s pretty consistently weird in all the ways we’ve come to expect from the man formerly known as Robert Zimmerman. Last week, Bob Dylan dropped his new book The Philosophy of Modern Song, and like most things the legendary musician does, it’s a whole lot to take in.
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