When was the last time he gave a long interview? In 2020, when he told the New York Times about his Rough and Rowdy Days album, the pandemic, the death of George Floyd, the mortality itself. Then he was a little pessimistic. Bob Dylan. Only when he talked about music and the past did he get excited.

In his recent interview with Wall Street Journalon the occasion of his book “Philosophy of Modern Song”, which includes essays on the song, something similar happens. When he mentions, for example, that he first heard the songs from the book on a record player, jukebox, radio, he emphasizes that this immediacy made them more personal. Streamers don’t like it: “Everything has a monotony,” he says, “everything is smooth and painless.” Somewhere he states that now, thanks to technology, “everything is very simple, very democratic.” Elsewhere, he admits that the Parthenon, the pyramids, the weapons of mass destruction were created with the help of science: “Technology can feed us or close the door on us.”

And here’s how he defines a great song: “It takes people’s feelings into account,” Dylan emphasizes. “When you hear this, you have an instinctive and at the same time emotional reaction. A good song follows the logic of the heart and stays in the head for a long time, like “Taxman”. It can be sung to a score for a symphony orchestra or a traveling minstrel, and you don’t have to be a great performer to sing it. You seem to be cursed, like something unearthly. It carries you and you feel like you are floating. It’s like an out-of-body experience.”