What Elvis Costello really thinks about Bob Dylan

I didn’t even own a Bob Dylan record until 1971. To me, he was a great singles artist.

May 06, 2026

I didn’t have the pocket money at the age of 11 to be buying all those records. And when I checked the chart placings of those records (such as “Like a Rolling Stone”), all of those records except “Maggie’s Farm” were Top 10 single hits for Bob Dylan. So we were hearing Bob Dylan not as an album artist, but as a singles artist on the Hit Parade alongside Freddie and the Dreamers and Tom Jones and, of course, the Beatles and the first records from Motown. And that is how I first heard him.

I didn’t even own a Bob Dylan record until 1971. To me, he was a great singles artist. You heard him on the radio. What a shocking thing to live in a world where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes “Like a Rolling Stone.” That was a great world, a very exciting time.

Up until then, all I knew of Bob Dylan was a stack of singles and some sheet music. I’d worked out the changes to “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” but the first Dylan songs I actually learned to play and performed in public were “Tears of Rage” and “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” The rest of the songs were just absorbed by osmosis or from being alive. You can learn a lot of songs that way.

When I heard ‘Girl’ by the Beatles and ‘Play with Fire,’ by the Stones I realised these were songs with a feel of decadence, a sense of young men having truly adult experiences. I definitely was attracted to all that!

And later on, in the Seventies, I also realised that Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde was the overt version of what ‘Girl’ was about. But by then you’d got girlfriends so you know what these things are. And now I know I’ve lived long enough to have lived the life that’s in the songs on Blonde on Blonde. Yet everything Dylan was writing at the time was heightened by the life he was living and the drugs that were around. I never had that experience.

I once recorded a demo of Bob Dylan’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” for a George Jones record I was hoping to persuade him to let me produce. I sang it as a country song and in all honesty sang: “Relationships have all been bad / Mine have been like lanes and rambles.” Much later, somebody pointed out that the line was actually: “Verlaine’s and Rimbaud’s.” My guess is that George Jones was not a huge fan of French symbolist poetry.

Bob Dylan’s 3rd show at the Universal Ampitheatre — Elvis in the building

I first met him in 1978 backstage at the Universal Ampitheater. It was a wonderful show. On my day off, Rockpile guitarist Billy Bremner came back to the Tropicana Motel after a game of pool and said he’d run into Steven Soles, who sang and played in Bob Dylan’s band. Billy wasn’t much of a Dylan fan, so he suggested I give his name and claim the tickets that Steven had left for him at the third show in a seven-night stand at the Universal Amphitheatre, a venue that was then still open to the stars. I arrived at the box office as a complete unknown.

It seemed unlikely that anyone would hear the difference between my voice and a Scottish accent, so I gave Billy’s name at the window and waited with my hand out. There were no tickets. Then something strange happened. The girl behind the glass recognized me, which was something of a long shot back then.

She became concerned that there must be some mistake and went away to confer with her supervisor. He approached and hunkered down close to the counter and said in the conspiratorial whisper, worthy a spy movie: “There are actually no tickets in that name, sir, bur we’ve just heard thar Barbra Streisand cannot attend, so you may have her tickets.” It is just as I had suspected; there were really people who believed that everyone in show business lived in one big house.

Forty minutes later, I was sitting in the tenth row as Dylan and his vocal group lit into a terrific new song, “Baby, Stop Crying.” It sounded like something that Aretha Franklin should have recorded. I heard a lot of the numbers that night that I’d hoped he would perform, but I’d never imagined Bob Dylan songs with a saxophone or conga drums.

The band was large and dressed for success, if not for some showroom in outer space. I think Bob himself had a little line of silver stars down the seam of his pants, or perhaps my memory has just painted them in.

I was certainly surrounded by industry bigwigs, some of who were wearing more jewelry than a girl. A couple of them kept uncorking small glass vials and ducking down behind the seat in front to powder their faces. Then they’d come up jabbering all the way through the next number.

By the time we got to “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” the fellow directly in front of me was trying to bite off his own ear.

Yet it was through all this static that the song “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power) hit me when I least expected it. It had yet to appear on a record as Street Legal was not in the shops for another week.

Dylan was singing “Señor” as if someone’s life depended on it. And then it was gone in the air. Did I hear that bitter line quite right?

“Son, this ain’t a dream no more, it’s the real thing.”

When could I hear it again?

During what I took to be the finale, a man was lurking next to me, and he said, “When Mr Dylan sings “The Times They Are-Changin’” that’s your signal.’ I said, ‘My signal for what?’ He said, ‘You come with me then.’ I said, ‘Where are we going?’ ‘Backstage.’ And that was how it turned out that I was greeted at the backstage entrance by Bob’s then-agent and manager on the road, Jerry Weintraub, and invited me into the green room.

Sometime later, Bob walked in and looked me up and down. I can’t recall what was in his hand. He was wearing dark glasses but I thought he was looking at my shoes, back then they were the red Chelsea boots that I wore instead of carrying a business card. He said, ‘Well, I heard a lot about you.’ And the words that came out of my mouth will haunt me forever—I think you can probably guess what I said: ’And I’ve heard a lot about you.’ I’ve got to say, I’m very relieved to see that he found that funny.

Fortunately, this punctured the ice with laughter rather than seeming utterly dim-witted, and Bob and I exchanged a few curious words before his manager, Jerry Weintraub, appeared, escorting the very same chemically enhanced dignitaries who had been talking gibberish through most of the show. In any case, I was getting tired of kicking the shins of a rather overexcited drummer, and in order to subdue further misbehaviour, thought it better to leave.

A few weeks later I heard the brand-new Dylan record, Street Legal. I leaned down and pressed play on the small cassette player that was sitting on the floor next to the bed and it began to play. I’d already memorized two of the songs from that performance in Los Angeles. My new fascination was a song called “Is Your Love in Vain?” It sounded like a question that I meant to ask of myself more frequently.

We were booked for five shows in the Netherlands and only one apiece in Belgium and France, while we found the first of our Berlin dates canceled altogether due to lack of ticket sales.

The consolation prize was that this was on the very night that Bob Dylan was playing the Deutschlandhalle, an oppressive building designed by Nazi architects for the 1936 Olympics. We sat high up in the bleachers. The sound was strange and confusing in such a monolithic sports arena, so it was hard to distinguish if those were hoots of approval or howls of derision. Perhaps there were both.

People told me later that some of the audience had come expecting the Bob Dylan of 1965, with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica rack, and didn’t like his revue-style backing band with background singers or, more disturbingly, didn’t care for the color of the skin of the background singers. Between the end of the set and the encore, some young men in black ran forward, shouting something indistinct, and threw what might have been flour or white paint onto the lip of the stage. Someone said, “Anarchists.” Someone else said, “Idiots.”

The show had followed a similar path to the one in Los Angeles and it wasn’t clear if Bob was even aware of the dissent, until he launched into a beautifully sarcastic encore of “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.”

We’d been running along a parallel to the Dylan tour and received an invitation from some of the band members to join them back at their hotel, the Kempinski, a luxurious step above any establishment I had entered to that date. “Come on down,” they said. “We’re planning a midnight pool party.” The inventors of fraught and rococo theories about everything Bob Dylan probably didn’t imagine this after-hours scene that was a little more “Beach Blanket Bingo” than “Desolation Row.”

We hadn’t actually thought to bring our swimming togs to the show, so The Attractions and I sat around the poolside, drinking beer and eating all of Bob’s pizza and trying to prise out the details of Hermann Göring’s private railway car in which he was rumored to be riding from city to city.

My fondest memory of that night comes from sometime later in the party when Steve Nieve had stripped down to his underpants and was seen swimming up and down in opposite direction to our host, both of them wearing sunglasses in the pool, while Bob’s background singers kept up an affectionate but teasing commentary from the sidelines. I woke up the next morning, back in our threadbare Turkish hotel in Neukölln, and took a taxi to Checkpoint Charlie.

A year later, I wrote the song “Possession” during a ten-minute ride back to Wisseloord Studios, and we cut the song as soon as we got through the door, while the blood was still pumping. Steve Nieve went to the piano and I played my faulty memory of the opening horn anthem from “Is Your Love in Vain?” on a Hammond organ, despite my song having completely different harmony and being taken at a considerably faster tempo.

It was a steal, but then the first line of my song was also “If there’s anything that you want,” and nobody seemed to care that this was also the opening line of “From Me to You” by The Beatles.

Elvis on stage, August 7, 1982, Great Northern Picnic, Parade Stadium, Minneapolis.

A few years later, we were out at the racetrack in Minneapolis, in 1982, having played our set shortly after Duran Duran and prior to the headliners for the day, Blondie. The message had been repeated throughout the day: “Don’t leave. Bob is on his way and wants to see you.”

We’d been through this scene before in 1978 in Amsterdam, when the entire front row of the Carré Theater had been reserved for “Mr. Dylan” and we’d ended up playing to a row of empty chairs. This time, I was assured, it would be different. We were a mere two hundred miles from Hibbing. It was almost a hometown gig. There was no sign of Bob by showtime, and he still hadn’t appeared by the time we came offstage. I figured it was all a put-on by a local comedian, but then another call was relayed to the festival office: “Bob’s on his way. Don’t leave.”

The promoter’s rep called over, “You’re not leaving now, are you? We’ve just heard, Bob will be right over.” Now I was sure it was a prank. The Attractions had long since taken off, but I found someone to talk to until I heard what sounded like the finale of Blondie’s set in the distance.

Now it was surely time to go, or l’d be caught in the departing crowd for hours. I felt a litcle crestfallen and foolish, bur the promoter’s man called for a vehicle to ferry me back to my hotel. My foot was already on the running board when a white minivan without windows pulled up in the dust at some speed.

The side door swung open and there was Bob Dylan waving for me to join his merry band. I was barely inside and clinging on the back of the driver’s seat as we pulled away at top speed.

Sara Dylan, Larry Kegan and Bob Dylan (April 1973)

The people in the vehicle looked like a group of friends that might have been on a fishing trip. One gentleman was in a wheelchair (Larry Kegan), hence the unconventional mode of transport, and the rest of us were standing or crouching as the van bumped over the dusty parade ground and onto the road back into town.

This was only my second meeting with Dylan, so I really didn’t expect myself to be invited into this kind of company. Aside from a few courtesies and introductions, I felt wary that I was intruding or that I’d start talking nonsense in this odd proximity.

Bob quickly took care of my being ill-at-ease by asking in a voice that sounded absurdly like that of Bob Dylan:

“So, is that “Watching the Detectives’ a real show?”

My mind was racing now. Surely this was all the wrong way around. Wasn’t I supposed to be doing the asking? Something along the lines of “So, Bob, where are the “Gates of Eden?” I can’t recall what I said in answer to the question, but the conversation quickly turned to guitar players we both liked.

It turned out that we’d both been invited to a late-night warehouse party at the loft of one of the Minneapolis film crew with whom I’d made several videos at the turn of the decade, and we made an agreement that I would meet Bob at a certain address at 10 p.m. sharp that night.

Before long, I found myself back on the pavement by myself outside the Marquette Hotel, wondering if I’d imagined the entire episode. I thought it would be the last I’d see of him, so I went to have a little supper to bide my time.

My cab pulled into the parking lot of the warehouse right at the stroke of ten. There didn’t seem to be anyone around at first, but then I heard someone hail me. I looked over, and there was Bob Dylan, standing next to a line of young teenagers propped on the hood of an old car. The lads were introduced to me and shook my hand.

That was the first time I’d met Jesse and Jakob Dylan, both of whom I’ve come to know as fine gentlemen. I assume that the third young man was their brother, Samuel. The brothers headed home, and their father and I went up to the party:

I soon discovered that it is not that easy to have a private conversation with Bob Dylan in public view. Even by the polite, relaxed standards of Minnesota, people had a hard time pretending not to eavesdrop. I could be an arrogant bastard back then and pretty much thought I knew it all, but I had a couple questions that I genuinely wanted to ask this master songwriter, none of them involving directions to Eden. Mostly, I wanted to know how it was possible to remain invisible enough to observe the very transactions between people that were the substance of so many of my songs and, for that matter, his.

Our voices dropped lower and lower so as to remain out of earshot, and the words fell further and further apart and started to make no sense, and the conversation ground to a halt without me receiving any reply that I can now recall.

I just had to look around to get my answer.

It was time to cut out.

Bob Dylan and I shared an agent in the States in 1995 and she’d had word from Bob about me maybe doing something with him in Europe, joining him on stage for the encores. But it also gave me a chance to try out the new songs and learn to sing them well, get acquainted with them in front of an audience. The thing about Dylan’s audience is that they really listen; I had a naturally disposed curious audience who were used to listening to words, either in new songs or, to use a horrible modern word, deconstructed versions of familiar material. I watched the Dylan shows from every different perspective; in Paris I watched from the side of the stage, I watched all three Brixton shows from a seat in the balcony, and I wandered all over the place in Dublin. It was fascinating to see what was going on. You can learn a lot from watching a guy like that. I really like the band he's got, they manage to rein the song back in just when it starts to go out too far, but they know to go with whatever happens. There were heart-stopping moments every night.

He leaves as soon as the concert is over. But, he collaborated with me on “Rainy Day Woman.” (Carole King on piano and Van Morrison on harmonica) It’s really fun to sing with him. He’s amazing. It was a great concert, but every night there was a song! It was exciting. That’s why it’s interesting. I don’t like artists who keep a safe distance from their boundaries.

I think a lot of artists make the job twice as hard by doing songs where it's impossible to escape the shadow of the original artist's personality or even the writer's personality — like they do too famous a song by a well-known writer. I think I'm able to take on "I Threw It All Away", because Dylan's version is comparatively off-hand. Whereas if you'd taken on "Mr. Tambourine Man", you'd have to compete with his original version, which is fantastic, The Byrds' wonderful record of it, and Dylan's current rendition of it, which was one of the highlights of his recent shows. Such was the departure of that record's (Nashville Skyline) vocal and writing style that the simple beauty of this song seems to have been overlooked. I performed the song on my very first solo tour in 1984.

When I was a kid, Bob Dylan was a pop star. "Times They Are A Changin'" and "Like A Rolling Stone" were in the charts alongside The Kinks and The Beatles. I never had his albums 'cos I never had the money. I didn't own any till I bought Blonde on Blonde in the '70s. Now I can afford them, I've got 'em naturally. Nashville Skyline is so overlooked; people were shocked to hear him singing, 'I want to spend the night with Peggy Day' instead of 'jewels and binoculars hanging from the neck of a mule'. I don't give a shit about whether he's a better poet than Keats. He's technically miles better than other pop writers.

I actually think Time out of Mind is the best record he’s made. He had the guts to think about it for however long it took instead of just making records. I think the sound of it is going to endure much better than Oh Mercy — I thought that Lanois production was too effete. The good songs on that record started to grate a little because the production was too at odds with the songs. But this time the production is very discreet. The recording of the voice is absolutely magnificent. He has got really interesting sounds in his voice, but some of them are very abrasive to our ears and certainly in concert can be very off-putting; but here some of his phrasing is absolutely unbelievable. You’re not listening to hear sweet-voiced singing, you’re listening to get the feeling he’s singing about.

“Not Dark Yet” strikes you right away as a mighty, mighty song and at first I would have liked to have heard more melodies of the quality of “Standing In The Doorway Crying,” “Trying To Get To Heaven” or “Not Dark Yet” and less of the blues tunes.

When I did Kojak Variety I listened to a lot of Willie Dixon and Jimmy Reed records, and they were making pop records; Willie Dixon was the master of making blues songs that were pop songs — he’d find a way of turning the change around in a way that was really memorable and distinct to that song. And the more I listen to this Dylan record, those blues songs have actually got very definite shape; once you get over the initial surprise that he’s used the blues form so much, they are sticking in my mind as much as the ones that I got into right away.

I’m delighted that he’s unafraid to say something as unfashionable as “We’re all gonna die”. But not in any kind of “Hey kids, let’s all get spooky” way, he just said it straight out. It gets sort of funny after a while. I find it pretty consoling and not at all depressing. Blues don’t make you feel bad. And the more I listen, the more humour and uplift I draw from it, rather than somebody blithely saying everything’s gonna be all right. For somebody like Dylan who’s had all these fantastic images pouring out of his head for most of his career, “Nothing means anything, life is hollow; we’re gonna die, everything’s far away” is the worst thing you could say, a big, admission of emptiness. But it’s such a bleak thing to say, there’s some solace in saying it. It can’t scare you any more. Whether that’s his intent is none of our business. I don’t care to know whether it’s his personal frame of mind or something that he knows to be the way things are at a certain time of life. It has the same effect. In a way it’s a greater achievement to have imagined it if it hasn’t happened.

The record I think is behind this is the Harry Smith archive (Anthology of American Folk Music reissued by Smithsonian Folkways). It’s six CDs, an awful lot to get through, but wherever you start you come across something the like of which you’ve never heard before in your life. As I understand the story, the Harry Smith archive was out on vinyl in the ‘50s when Harry Smith, an eccentric figure and (great musicologist, gathered together all this stuff. There’s two ways of looking at it: as either a trainspotterish, “Oh, you haven’t heard One Legged Willie Flute from Arkansas?” or you can say, “These are humans and they were up a tree somewhere singing in some ungodly way which we can’t understand.” They’re singing about babies dying, and it’s easy for us to sneer, but if you’d been listening to the radio and were living in a community where babies were dying every day of TB, then that song probably sounded like the voice of God.

A lot of the folk revivalists in America, of which Dylan is one, listened to this avidly and got a lot of their background, information and understanding of the folk culture from this collection. The weird thing is, you listen to it casually and you’ll suddenly go, What’s this line? “Railroad men drink up your wine.” The pay-off will be different but you’ll go, I know that line — it’ll be from Memphis Blues, not even a folk-type Dylan song. He’s quoted lines over the years; he’s not certainly stolen from it, he’s just actually referring to it.

It’s living tradition and he’s done it in such a smart way; taking the rural poetry in these songs and adding his own bit of poetry — that’s the way these songs probably existed in the first place. These songs have travelled across boundaries. You go back into the history of music and you’ve got John Dowland in Elizabethan times going to Denmark and taking his English blues songs over there. And of course it’s all got mixed up, and when the people travelled to America they had an even bigger opportunity to get mixed up. Every kind of culture mixed up — I mean, what’s Robert Zimmerman doing living in Duluth? That’s in itself a story. His family had to get there from somewhere. There’s folk music explained right there.

I did a US tour in autumn 2007 where I really felt in show business because I was on the bill of ‘The Bob Dylan Show.’ Throughout the fall, I’d been the warm-up solo act between Amos Lee and Bob and his band. I did 45 minutes just on my guitar. We’d visited a lot of cities called Bloomington. It seemed every state in the Union had one of those. We were mostly playing university venues where the audience consisted of curious students in woolen toques and hoodies, and older Dylan fans, some of whom looked like they’d been lurking under the bleachers since the 1960s. Both factions seemed to dig “Modern Times” and “Things Have Changed” just as much as “The Times They Are a-Changin”“ and while they spent the first part of my set taking bets on who I was, they usually gave me a pretty good clap by my last number.

For about two weeks I’d see Bob now and again backstage. I saw his set nearly every night. And it was marvellous because you got to see the way he negotiated with his own history, with his own focus on particular lyrics over others. And then he suddenly asked me to come up at soundcheck. When I walked out onto the stage, Bob Dylan was quite alone. I often heard Bob rehearsing but I’d not seen him do so without his band before. He looked up from his guitar and said, “Ive been thinking about ways to get you into the act. And I said, Great, whatever you like.” And he said, “I was thinking maybe we could do that song, “Peace, Love And Understanding.” I said, Well, that’s great, except I didn’t write it.

That afternoon, Bob and I had scrabbled through the changes of “Peace, Love and Understanding” for a verse or two, before the song ran aground just outside of the second chorus. “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t write this, you know? I think people might take it the wrong way if I come up in your set and sing a song from my show. What about we do one of yours? Maybe “Tough Mama.’” Bob started playing it without comment, but we quickly found that this song wasn’t going anywhere, either.

Bob Dylan is not a particularly easy man to compliment, and in our brief exchanges over the years I’d never presumed to tell him what I thought his songs were about. I thought he’d suffered enough.

Nevertheless, that afternoon, I said, “You know, I’m a father of three sons now, that song “Tears of Rage, it..” Then I trailed off and put my hand to my heart to underline my meaning. “Maybe we could try that one?” It had seemed a shocking, revolutionary song when I was seventeen and people were using the past as a dressing up box. The words were grave and the music had soul. I cannot think of another song that so catches the pain of the parent at the unwitting selfishness of the child. I felt as if I’d been both of those people by then. I’d sung that song since I was playing the Vankee Clipper with my partner Allan in Liverpool. Now I was singing it with the man who wrote those words, and it sounded pretty good, too.

Then the band was summoned to the stage and everyone got a little spooked and the song started to sound crowded. Bob said perhaps we should leave it for another day. I waited until rehearsals were over to see what the verdict would be, and as we walked away from the stage. I said, “You know, we could do it.” And then I’m expecting, well, maybe that’ll be in the show tonight. The show was great and I didn’t get the call. A few days went by and then a week went by and we’re still on the road. And I’d given up. And in St Louis, I was just probably getting a cup of coffee and suddenly his production manager comes flying in and goes, “Boss wants you up there.” And he’d decided to do the song with just the two of us.

Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello performing Tears of Rage, 22 October 2007, St. Louis, MO, Fox Theatre (remixed)

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I started to sing the first line, and I could see he wasn’t going to sing. He let me sing the whole first verse on my own. And I felt so exposed, y’know. And so I just kept singing. We got to the chorus and we harmonized. I started the second verse and I could see that look in somebody’s eyes when they’re going to sing so I sang the opening line and he sang the second line. And I’m there and he sings a line that’s not in the lyrics. Not only was it not in the lyrics as I knew them, it didn’t rhyme with my next one. I don’t even remember what noise I made, but it was one of panic. It’s one of my favourite things that ever happened. It was so chaotic. I hit my guitar so hard, it made him laugh.

This was the glorious little behind the curtain perspective that I had…It was a liberating thing to sing because I’ve cherished this particular song since I first heard it. So to get to sing a song written by two people that I admire my so much, and most importantly, the man who put the meaning into that melody, was an incredible experience.

As we came off the stage, he said, “Yeah, you sing loud. We should do a record of Johnnie & Jack songs.” I walked away with his manager and I said, “that’s never going to happen, right?”

It was Easter 2011 and we were in Australia to play the Byron Bay Blues-fest in northern New South Wales. I found myself apparently on the bill above Bob Dylan. But it was actually two concerts that were back to back at a festival in northern New South Wales. One afternoon, Bob and I arranged to have tea and we were sitting under the eaves of this chalet-like hotel. It was like almost tropical in weather in that there were tremendous rainstorms. The deluge was rolling off the shiny giant rubbery leaves of the primordial vegetation all around our secluded hotel.

Bob Dylan and I were drinking coffee not thirty feet from where some of his most ardent admirers were standing around the bar of the hotel, trying to look nonchalant while hoping to catch sight of their man.

Not a single soul thought to look around the corner to where we were seated.

And we just talked about stuff the way you do when you’re on the road. We spent a little time talking about old songs or forgotten records, as the rain cascaded off the overhanging caves. Then we started to talk about … “Have you got any songs”

“I’ve got one for you,” I said, and explained that I’d written a song about the travels and travails of a Jimmie Rodgers impersonator working the English musical halls in the late 1930s. Now I had an audience, and as the man had said himself, “I’ll know my song well before I start singing.

Or in this case, reciting:

Third-class ticket in his pocket
Punching out the shadows underneath the sockets
Tweed coat turned up against the fog
Slow coaches rolling o’er the moor
Between the very memory
And approaches of war

Stale bread curling on a luncheon counter
Loose change lonely, not the right amount
Forgotten man of an indifferent nation
Waiting on a platform at a Lancashire station
Somebody’s calling you again
The sky is falling
Jimmie’s standing in the rain

Nobody wants to buy a counterfeited prairie lullaby in a colliery town
The hip flask and fumbled skein of some stage door Josephine is all he’ll get now
Eyes going in and out of focus
Mild and bitter from tuberculosis

I saw the rhyme of “focus” and “tuberculosis” cross his eyes. Like, “Oh, yeah.” I laid a glove on the champ. Okay. I gor one shot in, I’d better not push my luck.

I don’t recall if I pressed on to Jimmie’s bitter end or if I trailed off in the next chorus, but I already knew the song was good.

Here’s the best part about it, though: Not that he paid me any compliment about it, except that he said, “I want to read you something.” He reached into his pocket and unrolled a little scroll as if it were something Greek that looked like a bus ticket, with tiny writing on it, and proceeded to recite some verses that might have been from some particularly gruesome passage of the Old Testament or a Screamin Jay Hawkins song or like Victorian-actor-manager recite, “I play in blood but not my own.” But it was one of the most riveting, thrilling things. It was pretty hard to gather all the words on one hearing and to print them in my memory, apart from one about having “the same eyes as your mother does” and something about drugged wine, and that the stanza always arrived at what I took to be the refrain: “I’ll pay in blood but not my own.”

Each time that line came around it was delivered with a different flourish: a swashbuckler’s panache, a black comical riposte, held with a steady gaze, tossed away with a wicked laugh or the ghost of a smile. It was a private moment. But what it illuminated for me was the love of finding words.

It was, to say the least, an unusual experience, but there was also something of the card game or a sparring match about it, and I wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

So in only this way are we the same. I am to him as the guy who fills the ink wells.

There were so many acts appearing on the different stages at the festival that there were no real headliners as such; the audience had to plot their way from stage to stage through the schedule as their interests dictated.

I’d watched a lot of Dylan shows when I toured with him in 2007, and no two of them were the same, but I knew that Bob was never known for pandering to people with sets filled with just his most famous songs.

So it had to be the night when we were to follow him that his choices were utterly ruthless, the solos were kept tight, and the songs piled up, one upon the other, in a sequence that was unbeatable.

I was standing side-stage with Pete Thomas. Around the time that the band went from “The Levee’s Gonna Break” into “Tangled Up in Blue,” I leaned into Pete and said, “Were in trouble here. We’ve got to follow this. We’d better open with something they recognize or we’ll be playing to an empty tent.”

The great Dylan songs rolled out one after another: “High Water (For Charley Patton),” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Highway 61 Revisited.” “Ballad of a Thin Man”..

The tent was stifling in the late antipodean summer, and I stepped our onto the loading ramp as Bob and his band hit the encore of “Like a Rolling Stone” followed by “Forever Young”

I could hear just fine from there and a faint breeze was welcome. I was still sitting on a flight case listening to the baying of the Byron Bay crowd as the DJ put on some music to signal the changeover. The silhouette of a gunslinger was heading in my direction with a skip and a shuffle under his big, wide-brimmed har. “There you go, I’ve softened ‘em up for you,” he said, as he passed on his way by.

When I first heard Shadows in the Night, I loved his performances of those songs. It's utterly sincere and presented with fine drama. I saw him do a show at the Albert Hall and it was one of the best shows I've ever seen. I think it’s really, truthfully, one of the greatest records he’s ever made. It’s so soulful. He’s obviously lived with those songs in his heart for a long time, and he sings them that way. The question of whether they are the same in sound as someone else singing them is kind of idiotic. It’s the way he sounds singing them. It’s beautifully arranged, beautifully played, beautifully recorded. What more can you say? He’s written all those beautiful songs, and this shows the appreciation he has for all those great tunes as well.

On “Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes” we got 24 previously unreleased lyrics by Bob Dylan from 1967. It’s great that we got these lyrics. Bob was incredibly creative at the time and wrote a wealth of incredible songs for the Basement Tapes, such as “Hey Heavy and a Bottle of Bread”. We have the freedom to do whatever we want with the material. Together with a group of other songwriters we recorded 44 songs in twelve days. Really wonderful stuff that people always hoped Bob Dylan would have recorded back then. We’ve done that now. I was attracted to the mood of those songs, because I loved the Band and I loved John Wesley Harding. Those records are the product of the workshopping that they were doing. You hear a group of musicians trying stuff out, fooling around, playing half-finished songs, songs that sound like they've been made up on the spot, covers by other people. We had a lot of fun taking these texts from Bob and giving them very contrasting musical settings. We composed all this music separately, so the same text can sometimes be sung to four different pieces of music. One person’s blues can be another’s Hawaiian music.”

It was our good fortune that these lyrics came to light and we were given them to play with, it was a playground. The pleasure of doing it in a cooperative endeavor like this with other songwriters was to not have the arrogance to say, 'Well, this is how it goes and this is definitive' — because nothing's definitive. There are all these other versions. So that really changed the nature. I couldn't compare it to writing songs with Allen Toussaint or Burt Bacharach or Paul McCartney or anyone else I've ever written with. Everybody had their own idea of how the tune went, you could take the same lyric and there would be four different musical versions of that song. Somebody would write with complicated chords, another would have simple chords; somebody had done an up-tempo song, another had done a ballad.

Marcus Mumford, who has that talent for writing memorable songs with very few chords in them, could write a song that made you go, ‘wow, that’s a good tune’. The next thing we’d be making a record of it. We all saw what was on the page differently. And because we didn’t have the author of those lyrics there to argue his side of it — and we were dealing with unfinished lyrics in some cases — there were choices to make.None of us felt we were dealing with something sacrosanct. There’s a sense of playfulness in the folio. They range from the completely barmy to wonderful, beautiful, well-constructed lyrics that are right there waiting to be sung.

We were walking in, all this time later, to find ideas in a box and turn them into songs. We were originally handed a sheet of typescripts and transcriptions. And actually, when it came to making an emotional connection with something written so long ago, the final piece of the puzzle was to see the handwritten originals. Because then you see the rhythm, you see choices being made on the fly because there are crossed-out words. You could see where thoughts were joined together, where the emphasis was placed a bit more. You can’t worry that you are tampering with a classic canon. Those big headlines are a little bit like tombstones, they’re epitaphs for the arts of songwriting. As far as I know Bob Dylan is a living artist, writing new songs and redefining old ones. It runs counter to the idea of making a definitive statement because it’s actually moving all the time.

If Bob Dylan is a benchmark, what happens if we saw the legs off the bench? What does it become then? Is it just a lower benchmark? Or is there a higher one? To me, this is just some words and music that I care about.

Upon hearing the last six or so minutes of ‘Murder Most Foul’, in which Dylan unfolds a litany of singers and actors names, song and film titles, I found myself filled with tears but not out of despair but because those named are no more lost to us than hope itself. They weigh in the balance on the side of worth and even a little truth, against all of the viciousness that has taken place since the brutal events in November ‘63, described in the opening stanzas. This song is “about President Kennedy” in the same way that, Moby Dick is about a whale of a time. Make no mistake, this is a writer and - perhaps more importantly - a singer, operating at the top of their powers. Backed by an ensemble playing with the closest attention to the narrative line, the album is sung with incredible nuance that belies most estimations of what it takes to be a great singer and one which I suspect is informed by Dylan’s investigations into so many great American songbooks over these recent years.

To my ear, this is someone making an inventory of what is left that matters; the succour of a muse, a creature made from spare parts, the refusal to throw your shoes into to the crowd in an act of glib showmanship, rather it piles up all these whispered endearments, pleas, citations, asides, villainous threats and one particularly audacious passage in which Generals Grant, Zukhov and Patton are all cited as having cleared a path for “Presley to sing”.

I cannot think of another songwriter who would have proposed such a verse and it is such that makes this a record for the hours and the ages. We all of us live in The Time Of Homer… Simpson, that is. Dylan’s words and music dwell at the fork in the road where the Other Homer and the roadmaster, Bill Monroe, trade secrets.

I live in the 21st century, and I don’t think everything I did in the 20th century is worthwhile. I suppose Dylan feels the same way, because his new album Rough and Rowdy Ways is as intense and beautiful as any of his past work.

In The Philosophy of Modern Song Bob Dylan says I use too many words? Coming from Bob Dylan that’s a pretty good compliment: the man who just wrote a 16-minute song. You know, often there’s an element of humour in the delivery that I think people miss. You have to kind of read it in his voice. “Pump It Up” obviously took more than a little bit from “Subterranean Homesick Blues. One night, many years ago, Bob Dylan said to me: “U2! How could they do that to you? How could they take your song like that?” It took me a moment to know what he was talking about, and a moment more to realize that he was putting me on. But then, U2’s “Get On Your Boots” was probably to “Pump It Up” what “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is to Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.”

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