So here we are, stuck inside of Croonerville with the Sinatra blues again. Fallen Angels is the second volume in which Bob Dylan sings the Great American Songbook, recorded at the same time (and with the same core band) as Dylan’s 2015 album Shadows In The Night. Those who hated that record are gently advised: Please move along. Nothing on this set is likely to change your impression.

Those remaining, and at this point that may be a handful, you already know what kind of scene awaits when you drop in: Lights are low. There’s an ashtray that needs emptying on the table. Fading neon signs blink behind the bar. The band is tuned up, the amps are set to Maximum Torch. And, as before, our star is a touch road-worn, grizzled in a way that may only seem charming to immediate family. It’s a tableau rich in period details, the ideal setting for a singer whose mission is to interpret some of the most elegant melodies in pop-music history.

Even if that singer is Bob Dylan, who will celebrate his 75th birthday four days after Fallen Angels is released. Dylan isn’t exactly known for having nimble pipes; a recurring knock against Shadows, which concentrated on songs recorded by Frank Sinatra, was that a voice with such a high gravel quotient should stay away from the sleek, graceful, demanding lines within songs written by Richard Rodgers and Cole Porter.

But possessing a pleasing vocal tone is really just one element of the singing business. The larger challenges involve personalizing a melody, shaping each phrase so it rings true. This is where Sinatra towers above mortals: His sighs, small gestures and nuance-rich asides tell — or, more accurately, hint at — stories inside of stories.

Dylan, a storyteller from way back, understands this. In spite of the limitations of his vocal instrument, he has created a whispery, willfully idiosyncratic phrasing style, a way of ambling through tunes (his own on recent records, those written by others here) that feels disarmingly believable, at least most of the time.

On Fallen Angels, Dylan sings as though he’s deep within a reverie — seized by the memory of some “pug-nosed dream” from 30 years ago, unable to fully bring himself into the present. He evokes heartbreak, or recollections of heartbreak, with a convincingly unsteady tremble. He sings lighter love songs with a vaudevillian’s panache. And even when he’s rendering something that requires a more philosophical tone, like “Young At Heart,” he invests the lines with some personal meaning, some trace awareness of his own fragile state. In this way, he’s turned advanced age, with its endless backward glances, into an advantage: These are old songs sung by an old guy who is fully owning the oldness, the melancholy, the spontaneous outbreaks of gushy sentimentality.

Naturally, fittingly, the accompaniment is aimed at the older set; somehow, Dylan and his band catch the grace of a bygone era without descending into despair or corniness. The foundational rhythms are foxtrot and what jazz drummers derisively call the “businessman’s bounce” — pleasant ballroom-dancing rhythms that have aged out of relevance. Atop that is the steadying presence of rhythm-guitar strumming in a Western swing mode. Atop that sits wonderfully wistful, sloping leads from pedal-steel master Donny Herron — the hero of these sessions, whose lines frame and animate Dylan’s vocals without getting in the way. Check out “Polka Dots And Moonbeams,” the Jimmy Van Heusen/Johnny Burke ditty that was Sinatra’s first hit with the Tommy Dorsey band way back in 1940. It’s a song about a moment on a dance floor, and Herron opens it with a gracious, entrancingly spare instrumental chorus. By the time Dylan sings the opening line, “A country dance was being held in a garden,” the mood is fully established; the band sounds as if it’s been entertaining dancers for hours. Unfortunately, not everything coalesces to that degree: “Skylark” feels unnecessarily hurried, while “All Or Nothing at All” never really finds a comfort zone. For all its surprising spryness, the album’s lone barn-burner, “That Old Black Magic,” has a moment or two where the music nearly goes flying off the rails.

It is folly, everyone knows by now, to ponder the motivations and intentions of an artist like Bob Dylan. Still, the presence of a second volume of standards sparks an inevitable, “What is the Bard trying to teach us?” kind of curiosity. Heck, even the volume’s title invites parsing. Who, exactly, are the “Fallen Angels” here? The lovers from a bygone age of decorum and earnestness, whose amorous exploits are detailed in these songs? The romantics who immortalized those lovers, in language bright with innocence? Of course, Dylan could be referring to the songs themselves, artifacts from an also-bygone age. Maybe it’s a sly commentary by comparison, with Dylan holding up a structurally brilliant and musically inspired peak moment in the history of songwriting — like “Polka Dots And Moonbeams” or “Skylark,” or really any of these tunes — as if to suggest that this crystalline achievement was routine not so long ago.

Maybe it’s all of the above, a lamentation on 10 levels at once. What to do when angels are falling and ideals are eroding? Cue the torch songs.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Record-making is typically not a spectator sport.

Most of the time, what we hear from a recording artist is exactly what the artist intended to share, and no more. That “finished” product follows from a thousand individual decisions, each involving an embrace of risk, a willingness to experiment and, in the event of a crash, the wisdom to leave the wreckage on the cutting-room floor. In the studio, decisions are made with the knowledge that a small shift can change the entire complexion of a work: Sometimes, an idea becomes an extended fruitless trip down the rabbit hole; sometimes, it’s a thunderbolt of genius. We don’t necessarily need to peek behind the curtain and hear each step involved in the development of a creative work in order to appreciate it — because, let’s be real, some of those in-between moments are akin to watching water come to a boil.

Still, there are instances where the evolutionary path of a work can offer a valuable education all by itself. The latest vault excavation in the Bob Dylan bootleg series is one of them. Covering the 14-month stretch in which Dylan recorded Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde, it portrays record-making as a process of divination and inspiration management, a mystical balance of instinct, impulsiveness and cold-eyed reckoning aimed at the singular goal of bringing songs to life. It offers an unusual perspective on the constantly shifting demands of creating in the art equivalent of a laboratory: We hear Dylan doing the off-camera work of transforming stray ideas into full-blown feasts of images and abstractions. Then we hear him pivot to an entirely different skill set in order to wrestle with the challenge of framing, capturing and presenting that initial spark to the world. He’s not focusing exclusively on the narrative, the phrasing, the structure of the song or its foundational rhythm; he’s seeking a magic alignment and calibration of those elements, live and in real time.

The end results — three albums so saturated with inspiration, they loom as inescapable landmarks in popular music — have been analyzed endlessly. The Cutting Edge, which is available in several configurations geared to various degrees of Dylan obsession, doesn’t burnish the legacy of those classics. Instead, it provides some backstory, hinting at the mood and methodology of the sessions. Over and over again, with a shifting cast of musicians working across a range of musical styles, Dylan tasked himself to transcend whatever was expected from him.

These work-in-progress tapes port the listener back to the time when the songs were still pencil scribblings, endlessly malleable and subject to change. They suggest that, well before he got in trouble for taking liberties with the melodies of his songs in live performance, Dylan was a resolute, committed improvisor. He treated the recording process as something other than simple documentation; it was more like an act of discovery, aimed at uncovering intentions lurking three levels deep. He was openminded in the extreme. He changed the rhythms, the melodies and the words, and shifted the emphasis points in his phrasing — all in the name of letting the song show him how it should go. For decades, we’ve known “Just Like A Woman,” from Blonde On Blonde, as a medium-tempo waltz-meter creation. But there was a time when Dylan attempted it in a brisk Bo Diddley beat in 4/4. Is this treatment “better” than the version we know by heart? Does it matter? What’s interesting is that he went there at all.

The fevered 14 months represented here capture the moment when Dylan became comfortable in his shoes — and, if not yet confident about his every decision, at least trusting the authority of his writing. During this stretch, he fully embraced the wild potential of life after folk, fully immersed himself in the cadences of the blues, and fully engaged the surreal and the absurd as methods for truth-telling. He understood precisely the messages he wanted to convey, and was willing to try out all sorts of different shades and tones — his weary, resigned voice, or the one that’s closer to annoyance — in order to give his words maximum resonance. He’s often suggested that he wasn’t comfortable with being tagged as a prophet or an oracle of his generation, but when that talk began, in the period just before this creative eruption, he didn’t run away. He seized the platform. He recognized that his previous works had opened up a channel of communication, and he was just curious enough (crazy enough?) to want to know where that might lead. So he wrote a ton of songs and tried out a ton of ideas. He approached the act of making music with fearlessness he hadn’t displayed before.

That’s the macro story. This archival release is a heaping helping of micro, the back pages and pre-histories of songs listeners know by heart. Laced with outtakes, rehearsal tracks and song ideas that were later discarded, it illustrates just how mutable music can be, and how tiny decisions, made impulsively in the heat of the moment, can mean the difference between a pleasant track and a screaming fireball of world-changing sound.

Consider “Like A Rolling Stone,” Dylan’s first Top 10 hit. It was first attempted on June 15, 1965, at the end of the first session for Highway 61. Dylan starts out playing harmonica, but the feel is a bit rushed. Take 2 is slower, but after a long day of blues belting, Dylan’s voice is ragged and he stops to clear his throat. The performance begins to coalesce the next day, and in each of several takes, Dylan and the band test out slightly different tempos — you can hear them zeroing in on the exact feel without fully committing to the groove. And then, after various trial-and-error takes, they nail it: The master rendition captures the majesty of some of the slower versions and the fire of the faster ones, and the band, playing together in real time, sounds as if it could cruise along on this groove forever. It feels like an instant masterpiece, even if it wasn’t so instant.

More than the other Bootleg Series documents, this one shows Dylan as not just prone to experimentation, but also a resourceful recycler of his own top-shelf ideas. Images and characters recur, and sometimes metaphors, basslines and other devices echo from one song to another. He knew when he wrote something great, and often re-used some of the elements for other songs: The chord sequence of “Like A Rolling Stone” returns for what might diplomatically be described as a songwriting exercise — “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?”

The picture that emerges from these unreleased tunes and alternate takes is that Dylan was in a state of genuine flow during this period; one annotation in the excellent accompanying book observes, “Songs were pouring out of Dylan at a remarkable pace.” And, it must be said, an incredible number of them were keepers. Even the rehearsal takes — of his angry, castigating harangues, withering appraisals of duplicitous women and yowling, despairing updates on the blues — show how fervent he could be, how he understood that in order for the profundity of his songs to have maximum impact, they had to be expressed in the language understood by the heart and not the head.

That alone is reason for music-makers to go to school on this brave trove of outtakes: Records are often about a controlled, computer-smoothed uniformity, in which lots of the decisions can be automated and instant — and, as a result, slightly less impactful. The Cutting Edge documents an age when musicians huddled in small rooms and hammered stuff out, one “What if?” at a time, in the process cultivating an energy circuit so strong it could not be denied. Dylan understood that harnessing that energy was a multi-disciplinary endeavor involving not just big-picture thinking, but also tiny decisions — about tempo and implication, texture and tone. He recognized that, while record-making is not a spectator sport, it is, at its essence, a game of inches.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

He lived at the house known as Big Pink, in the woods near Woodstock, and during the summer of 1967, responsibility for his care was shared by Bob Dylan and members of The Band. Hamlet was on the scene during the fruitful recording of The Basement Tapes, part of the storied atmosphere that led to one of the most vivid chapters in American music.

You might remember the multi-instrumentalist and singer Garth Hudson recalling those sessions and referencing Hamlet in The Last Waltz: “Chopping wood and hitting your thumb with a hammer, fixing the tape recorder or the screen door, wandering off into the woods with Hamlet … it was relaxed and low-key, which was something we hadn’t enjoyed since we were children.”

Later, Bob Dylan looked back on that period in an interview with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, he touched on similar themes. “That’s really the way to do a recording: in a peaceful, relaxed setting. In somebody’s basement. With the windows open … and a dog lying on the floor.”

Hamlet was that dog, and he’s about the only Big Pink denizen not fully accounted for on the six-disc The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11. There’s no What The Dog Saw essay, and aside from a cutout image of the photograph used in the original 1975 release, there are no photographs of him in the lavish folio — which is sized to emulate reel-to-reel tape boxes of the era and contains other great images, including one of Dylan, in flip flops, taking out the trash.

Given what we know about dog energy and its effect on humans, it’s reasonable to conclude that Hamlet’s presence contributed in some small way to the wonderfully settled, easygoing feeling of these recordings. Perhaps he deserves some formal credit, because in a sense, that feeling — redolent of the rhythms of daily domestic life, the palpable atmosphere of a home in the woods — is the central story of The Basement Tapes. It’s key to the whole endeavor, possibly more striking than the line-by-line genius of the songs themselves.

Listening to the mother lode in its entirety, from the gems to the false starts, jokey throwaways and talkback chatter, the first and most prominent impression is this unpressurized, almost familial working environment. You can’t escape the vibe in the room — everybody’s loose and open to ideas, especially preposterous ones, and the rhythms are serene, rustic, relaxed. Nobody’s rushing to make a meeting. Nobody’s thinking of going anywhere; the remote location could be a zillion miles from the commercial world, and these people like it that way. Their mission is not to “make a record” the way Dylan’s peers were doing in 1967, but instead to explore music, using just their wits and whatever instruments were lying around. And to have fun doing it.

Arranged in rough chronological order based on the numbering system used by The Band’s Garth Hudson (who served as the engineer), this version of The Basement Tapes presents the material from the 1975 release in its original state, without overdubs. It’s best appreciated not as a collection of songs, but as a kind of audio documentary, a painstaking account of the daily song-chasing that went on for nearly seven months at Dylan’s house and then Big Pink. It catches Dylan in a fertile writing period, and offers telling glimpses into his process — his use of absurd placeholder words (“You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”) and nonsense syllables that would eventually become lyrics in subsequent versions. At the same time, it shows how resourceful his collaborators were as they cobbled together, often on the fly, a rustic and rarified textural landscape that could complement and enhance his images.

By all accounts, very little premeditation was involved: Hudson once noted that they were doing anywhere from seven to 15 songs in a day. Dylan worked constantly on lyrics, banging them out on an Olivetti typewriter sometimes right before tape rolled. He’d bring a page downstairs, and in a matter of minutes, a song would take shape. Not just any song, either: These sessions yielded “I Shall Be Released,” “Tears Of Rage (co-written with Richard Manuel), “Quinn The Eskimo,” “Northern Claim,” “This Wheel’s On Fire” (co-written with Rick Danko) and others. (And that’s not all: A trove of unused Dylan lyrics from that time provides the backbone of the T-Bone Burnett-produced The New Basement Tapes, which features Elvis Costello and others, and will be released Nov. 11.)

Recorded during a period of seclusion after Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident, The Basement Tapes present the already-iconic figure as he intentionally departs from the confrontational invective and tightly wound wordplay of the triumphs in his recent past — among them the single “Like A Rolling Stone” and the album Blonde On Blonde. Driven by what sounds like a desire to simplify his art, he begins by diving deeply into traditional American gospel (“My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It”) and modern offshoots (a tremendous version of Curtis Mayfield‘s “People Get Ready”), folk (“Po’Lazurus”) and country (Johnny Cash‘s “Big River” and “Folsom Prison Blues”). The Band’s Robbie Robertson has said that during this early phase, Dylan was “educating” his collaborators on folk and other styles they’d only recently encountered; they’d been primarily an R&B band before the Dylan tour. From there, Dylan wrote at a torrid clip, generating simple ballads, allegorical blues and story songs. These follow the general outlines of the covers; they eschew fancy language in favor of blunt declarations, and are built on the crisp, regular cadences of the blues. Though they’re not exactly heavy treatises, Dylan does at times venture into heavy topics — like the nature of goodness, salvation and the meaning of existence, themes he tackled more directly on his next album, John Wesley Harding.

Underpinning all the songs, even the ridiculous ad-libbed riffs that were likely never intended for public consumption, is Dylan’s pronounced irreverence: When he’s leering at a young girl in “I’m Your Teenage Prayer,” he sounds nothing like the anointed voice of his generation, or some bard or oracle with special powers. Instead, he’s just another mysterious traveler who’s shaking off his old mode of communication and out to search for new ones. The atmosphere in The Band’s communal house helped this along, because here Dylan was just another eccentric, and thus part of whatever evolving joke was in progress. The crew carried the bantering right into the recordings: Dylan obsessives have long theorized about the mood during the delirious “See You Later Allen Ginsberg” and others, as well as the non-linear riffs in the early renderings of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” One verse begins with, “Look here, you bunch of basement noise, you ain’t no punching bag.” A few lines later, he exhorts said basement noise to “pick up your nose.”

Through it all, The Band’s members somehow retained the composure necessary to keep the grooves chugging along. These musicians were perfect foils for Dylan, as well as masters of coloristic accompaniment. Their ginger, intuitive support is more remarkable when you consider that they were feeling their way through the unknown. They had little guidance from Dylan in terms of how the tunes would evolve, yet they didn’t just stick to the job of supplying pretty chords behind Dylan’s words. They chased after the feeling behind the words: They looked beyond language for the sonic “aura,” and over and over again they used the smallest soloistic gestures and the most beautifully strident vocal harmonies to magnify it.

Often, when labels release an expanded version of a landmark album, the new version is heralded with hype about the unique “magic” of the creation. In some cases, there’s reason to be skeptical. With The Basement Tapes Complete, it takes about two minutes to determine whether there was any real mojo going on. Cue up “I Shall Be Released” and focus on the intertwined voices. It’s just the guys, and they’re sounding weary, like it’s time for a break. The organ is faint and almost invisible in the background, as it somberly outlines a church-like processional. Nothing flashy is going on. At the refrain, they assemble into a kind of ramshackle chorale and aim skyward, surging and lifting up in parallel to the melody like a Sunday-school choir — except these harmonies have some hurt in them, and desperation, too. These voices are long-shot candidates for redemption, but as they knit themselves into formation, the weirdest thing happens. The mass of ragged voices acquires an eerie angelic glow — an exact sonic parallel to the words. Magic basement noise, all the way live. And it couldn’t have happened any other way.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.