Over the past 15 years, Bob Dylan has leaned heavily on a single compositional formula: seaming together disparate pieces of pre-rock n’ roll music into a fresh, albeit hodgepodge musical tapestry, over which he sings increasingly dark poetry about the last stages of the life cycle. Tempest is no exception to this, and like its conceptual brethren, success or failure is determined by how deeply Dylan reaches into his well of early 20^th century music, and how vivid the images are in his stories…

Since he teamed up with Daniel Lanois in the late 1980s, Bob Dylan has pursued a recording sound that harkens back to before Phil Spector and yet doesn’t quite fit soundly in the past. Dylan employs his encyclopedic musical reserve to seam together different eras and ideas. In effect, he’s been writing an alternative history of music, highlighting both the overlooked and select popular cuts while scrapping decades of developments — some of which Dylan himself developed — so as to satisfy this choice narrative. It’s this pursuit that contrives “Duquesne Whistle,” a crossroads joining Johnny Cash’s freight train rhythm and Big Bill Broonzy’s forlorn howl…

Today, on his official website, Bob Dylan announced the upcoming release of his 35th studio album, Tempest, on Columbia Records. As he has done for all of his post-2000 output, Dylan produced the record himself under the pseudonym “Jack Frost”. The album, which boasts ten all new tracks, is set for a September 11th release…

Versus is a series in which we pit selected albums against one another and offer case statements for which is superior. In our latest installment, we isolate three of Bob Dylan’s most acclaimed records and pose the question: which do you think is his best album? …