Bob Dylan's America (w/ Will Epstein)

"That’s the problem with a lot of things these days," wrote Bob Dylan in 2022 , " Everything is too full now; we are spoon-fed everything. All songs are about one thing and one thing specifically, there is no shading, no nuance, no mystery. Perhaps this is why music is not a place where people put their dreams at the moment; dreams suffocate in these airless environs." This mournful attitude — for a lost age of artfulness, mystery, and hope — pervades Dylan's 2022 book, Philosophy of Modern Song. In this sense, it's a quintessentially conservative book. But decline and nostalgia are not its only themes. In short bursts of prose reflecting on sixty-six totemic songs (from Webb Pierce's 1953 hit "There Stands the Glass;" to The Fugs' 1967 proto-punk romp "CIA Man;" to Nina Simone's unimpeachable "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"), Dylan conjures a country — and canon — defined most of all by mutability, motion, and menace. Dylan's America never stops moving, reinventing itself, or rebelling against its own strictures. Things get better; things get worse; what they don't do is stay the same. To help us make sense of Bob Dylan's idiosyncratic vision of America and American song, we're jo…