Changing times A kaleidoscopic journey through the musical influences that shaped Bob Dylan's 60-year career-from Perry Como to the Fugs

When the young Robert Zimmerman discovered folk music in the late 1950s, he was transfixed.

- Bob Stanley

It seemed weightier and more serious than anything he was hearing on the radio. Overnight, he shunned his old favourites Little Richard and Fats Domino for singers of songs that he considered to be deeper, sadder, more despairing, and more triumphant than regular pop music. Having created a new persona and invented a wandering minstrel backstory he became a figurehead for the folk movement. He then spent the next 50odd years playing with, and gradually unpicking, this persona. Now in his 80s, Dylan wants to bring us closer than ever to his teenage self.

The Philosophy of Modern Song features 66 short essays on songs Dylan loves, beautifully illustrated with shots of old American record shops, casinos, fairgrounds, movie theatres, and record-pressing plants. Here he is, guards down, eulogising Frank Sinatra's Strangers in the Night.

It's unlikely, but it's wonderful.