Chronicles

"Dylan has had a career of extraordinary richness and variety. Yet here he is writing a memoir that completely ignores everything which made him a world figure. It ignores all of his most famous songs, it ignores all the periods in which he was a great star. It’s all about times when he was trying to learn, when he was confused and lost but absolutely alive with the thrill of discovering new ideas, new singers, new information. It’s a marvellous, eyes-wide-open partial-autobiography. It’s also wonderfully written; the words are alive on the page. It clearly wasn’t co-written or talked into a tape recorder. It’s a great piece of writing. His is probably the most complexly expressive voice that I’ve heard. There’s just no end to the shades of meaning that come out of the way he shapes a word. The way he shapes a phrase can leave you hanging – he can take you so far with just a turn of a syllable. That’s really it. It comes down to his singing. He gave me something I wanted to write about."