Publisher Description
The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan’s first book of new writing since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One—and since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. The audio is narrated by an all-star lineup including Bob Dylan, Jeff Bridges, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Oscar Isaac, Helen Mirren, Rita Moreno, Sissy Spacek, Alfre Woodard, Jeffrey Wright, and Renée Zellweger!
Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny. And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition. Running throughout the book are a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work’s transcendence.
In 2020, with the release of his outstanding album Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan became the first artist to have an album hit the Billboard Top 40 in each decade since the 1960s. The Philosophy of Modern Song contains much of what he has learned about his craft in all those years, and like everything that Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement.
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“It’s a moving experience to hear this musical and literary giant deliver his takes on these iconic songs. His artistic and social sensibilities are in high gear, and the other remarkable cast members all narrate with equal engagement and charisma…Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
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AudioFile
About the Narrators
Charlayne Woodard is
a film, stage, and television actress, as well as a playwright. She is best known
for her recurring roles as Janice on The
Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Vonda on Roseanne,
and Sister Peg on Law & Order:
Special Victims Unit. She was one of the original cast members in the Tony
Award–winning Broadway musical Ain’t Misbehavin’, and in 2009, starred in a
one-person performance called The Night
Watcher at Primary Stages in New York City.
Sissy Spacek is
an Academy Award–winning American actress and singer. She has appeared in a
number of films, including Badlands,
Carrie, and Coal Miner’s Daughter, for which she won an Academy Award for Best
Actress. She
has also received Oscar nominations for her roles in Missing, The River, Crimes of the Heart, and In the Bedroom.
Dame Helen Lydia Mirren is an award-winning English actor of stage, screen, and television. She began her acting career with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1967 and is one of the few performers who have achieved the triple crown of acting, having won the movie industry’s Academy Award for Best Actress, Broadway’s Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play, and television’s Emmy Award for her performance as police detective Jane Tennison on the acclaimed series Prime Suspect. She is also an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator.
Kiff VandenHeuvel, voice talent and audiobook narrator, is originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is an alumni of the Second City comedy theater. He is an accomplished improviser and sketch comedy director, and he teaches voice-over, improv, and directing at Second City Hollywood. He has appeared in hundreds of television and radio commercials and is well known in the video game community as the voice of Zachary Hale Comstock in Bioshock: Infinite.
Jeff Bridges has starred in many of the most beloved films of our time, including The Last Picture Show, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Starman, The Fisher King, Fearless, American Heart, The Big Lebowski, The Contender, Seabiscuit, and True Grit, which earned Bridges the 2011 Academy Award for Best Actor.