Bob Dylan takes us on a wide-ranging tour of songs he admires

By Bob Dylan. Simon & Schuster. 339 pp. $45 - - Over the course of his six decades of omnipresence in public life, Bob Dylan has manifested many guises: Guthrie-besotted roustabout, silvertongued enfant terrible, dignified country-western crooner, world-weary gypsy, fire-and-brimstone evangelist, befuddled ‘80s artifact, and finally the sly and wizened trickster of his triumphal later years. Dylan’s penchant for personal transformation creates the eerie, quasimystical feeling that there is not one single person dwelling within the singer but several, that somehow, the strange, enchanted boy from Minnesota’s Iron Range contains all the multitudes of American

music within his diminutive frame.

This notion of Dylan as oracle provides the backdrop for his new essay collection, whose delightfully portentous title, “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” is a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of his mythic status: Aristotle as an A.M. radio DJ. It has 66 brief vignettes about memorable sides cut by performers ranging from the Sun Records also-ran Jimmy Wages to the 1940s multithreat Perry Como to Dylan’s old touring buddies the Grateful Dead to his musical inheritors, like Elvis Costello and the Clash. Some of the analyses, which can already be loose, are accompanied by brief pieces that treat the songs as creative-writing prompts.

In keeping with the theme of his omniscient zeal for songcraft, Dylan betrays no sense that there is anything remotely odd about zigzagging among Jimmy Reed, Rosemary Clooney and Santana, itself a meaningful insight into the wide-open apertures of his powers of expression.

This is Dylan’s first book of prose since “Chronicles: Volume One” (2004), which was a startlingly muscular display of prose writing whose sui generis voice seemed cobbled together from stray parts of Charles Portis, James Joyce and the Book of Revelation. (Collections of his lyrics and his Nobel Prize acceptance speech have been published in the time since.) “Chronicles” was a transporting medley of fever-dream memoir, shaggy-dog stories and oddball philosophizing that consecrated, impossibly, yet another way in which Dylan could surprise us.

Readers have eagerly awaited “Chronicles: Volume Two,” but “The Philosophy of Modern Song” is not that. Not remotely. Whereas his previous book was decidedly austere in presentation, evoking the monochromatic sobriety of a black-and-white Bergman film, this new one is more like Fellini. It is bursting at the seams with color in old movie stills, throwback burlesque artwork and pictures of the artists represented within, a visual banquet to accompany the weird majesty of his essays.

And boy, are these essays weird. Longtime Dylan followers are accustomed to the peculiar cast that haunts his songs - scarlet women, jughead criminals, wanton judges, sanctified hobos and unscrupulous gamblers - and they festoon these pages as well.

Describing Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass” (1953), Dylan extrapolates the sad song into something remorselessly bleak: The song’s narrator “must justify and vindicate his entire being, he’s been betrayed by politicians back home, forsaken and double crossed.” He “doesn’t recall ever having a soul, or if he did, it’s long dead at the bottom of a lake.”

Costello’s glam-noir “Pump It Up” (1978) is regarded with similar, delectable dread. “The one-two punch, the uppercut, and the wallop, then get out quick and make tracks. You broke the commandments and cheated. Now you’ll have to back down, capitulate and turn in your resignation.” In its gnomic way, the haunted, hilarious corridors of “The Philosophy of Modern Song” offer the best insight yet into a crucial Dylan paradox: Music is clearly his salvation, but music also seems to scare the wits out of him.