Some of the analyses, which can already be loose, are accompanied by brief pieces that treat the songs as creative writing prompts.

It is filled with songs and hyperbole and views on love and lust even darker than Blood on the Tracks.

There’s little in the way of philosophy in The Philosophy of Modern Song, unless you’re looking for tangential rants about divorce lawyers or how nobody watches black-and-white movies anymore.

The Philosophy of Modern Song is a mouthful, a phrase that puts on airs. It asserts that the book is an important work, a tome that merits a place on your loftiest library shelf, up in the thin air where you keep the leather-bound, gilt-edged stuff.

The imposing title is perhaps tongue-in-cheek, for the book doesn’t offer—as Bobcats worth their salt might have predicted—anything close to what its title promises. What it does offer is perhaps even more valuable: It’s a generous book—as forthright as anything Dylan has ever laid before his audience—that manages to stick its landing somewhere between the perfect bathroom read (short sections, handsomely illustrated, coincidentally just in time for Christmas) and The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton’s epic, eccentric and encyclopedic compendium of 1621.

... devious.

... a nimble, Surrealist compendium .. . Dylan has always had a vaguely tense relationship with the writers and journalists who frantically parse his songs for meaning, and, while reading The Philosophy of Modern Song, there were moments when I grew slightly red-faced, worried that the book might be an elaborate gag, poking fun at all the drooling critics who have gone berserk trying to illustrate the heft and beauty of his work. (Who among us has not mixed a metaphor once or twice?).

Promised to offer Dylan's insights into the nature of popular music. Actually, the breezy book is more like a late-night, old-school, once-hipster DJ riffing on dozens of songs you may or may not know.

Part humor, part history and part hogwash – a little like love letters to analog life and rebukes on the world gone wrong with a twist.

The nature, the mechanics, and the meaning of creativity, especially as it pertains to music, matter a lot to him, as he makes abundantly clear with his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. A collection of short essays, lyrical riffs, chunks of facts, and unpredictable digressions, generously illustrated with historical photos suitable for enjoyment at the coffee table.

As we’ve learned, things are never simple with Dylan, and The Philosophy of Modern Song can be as much of a surprise and puzzlement as his previous books. It’s part music-appreciation class, part podcast-style rant, and as unpredictable, cranky and largely engrossing as the man himself.

Dylan is sweeping out the ashes from the cave of a long career. He is casting a light on the Jungian shadows of popular song, examining both mechanics and metaphysics. Entertaining and profound, Dylan’s philosophy runs along the lines of Pascal’s Pensées, or the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius—personal ruminations on how to live with oneself, and the universe. Dylan finds profundities where others find ditties, but he always has.

The Philosophy of Modern Song is going to be rife with hot takes.

An entire tome of wild, erratic writing about music that is sure to bedazzle and befuddle.

The title of this book is a lie.

Sometimes dizzying, sometimes confounding, but rarely less than absorbing.

Dylan writes...in bursts of seemingly dashed-off prose that are optimistically labelled 'essays' by the dust-jacket blurb. There is no explanation why he has chosen these particular songs, nor what their shared philosophy might be.

It’s unlikely, but it’s wonderful.

This is the work of a legend wanting to confuse people, to upturn the idea of relatable legacy completely.

Genuinely extraordinary.

When the most revered singer-songwriter of all time delivers a hefty tome about the art of song, you sit up and take notice. Yet surely no one will be surprised to learn that Bob Dylan’s mischievously titled The Philosophy of Modern Song barely pretends to offer a coherent treatise on the state of contemporary songcraft. Rather, its lavishly and wittily illustrated 340 pages are an excuse for the great man to write with joyful zest, piercing profundity and flamboyant imagination about whatever crosses his mind.

Deeply subjective essays on songs Dylan holds dear, from standards and groundbreakers to obscurities and oddities.

Anyone looking for a glimmer of why Dylan’s verbal dexterity has always held—and continues to hold—so many of his admirers in thrall would do well to peruse The Philosophy of Modern Song.

... it seems to have been drawn like teeth from the head of its author, its title does not lack ambition. Philosophy is a big word; maybe one of the biggest. Heigh-ho, alas and also lackaday: Dylan turns out to be to philosophy what Kant was to the blues harmonica. Still, a collection of essays on individual songs from the finest songwriter of the postwar era is surely something to get excited about.

Bob Dylan’s impressive new book does a lot of things well, but if you’re looking for a coherent philosophy of modern songwriting, well, that may be hard to find in these pages. But it hardly matters because this eclectic book from the master of modern songwriting is engaging, insightful, and often funny.

Being Bob Dylan, he could certainly call Elvis Costello and hear everything the formerly young punk has to say about that 1978 rave-up. He didn't. Instead, he's here to tell you what the song makes him feel.

... idiosyncratic and heavily illustrated but it is likely to be lapped my by most Dylanophiles.

Widely entertaining romp.

There’s very little of what we could sensibly consider ‘modern song’ in The Philosophy of Modern Song, and any ‘philosophy’ is strictly of the cracker barrel variety. That’s ok, though, because we’ve learned never to take Dylan at face value, and the title was just too pretentious to have been meant seriously. The book’s content, though, is another matter. The puzzle facing the reader as they wade through this text is whether the ‘essays’ within are intended entirely or only partly as a piss-take.

... a kind of music-appreciation course open to auditors and members of the general public. It is best savored one chapter, one song, at a time, while listening to the accompanying playlists, which its readers have assembled on music-streaming platforms. Professor Dylan lectures a little, then you press play.

Dylan recreates the feel of about 70 lyrics, in a language where passion and precision coincide. It’s a daredevil attempt, because he keeps reminding himself that the odds are stacked heavily against it – the 'heresy of paraphrase' when a poem is reduced to a summary, may be compounded when words are detached from a melody.

These are a fan’s notes rather than a songwriter’s secrets, and even though we already knew that Dylan’s musical taste is more eclectic than the average 81 year old’s, his appreciation of everything from vaudeville to blues and honky-tonk to soul and punk is pretty inspiring.

Dylan serves up essays on 66 songs, each piece sparking conversation of the sort you could imagine hearing in the aisles of a vinyl-packed record store or at the bar of a nightclub that keeps a small stage in the corner for the benefit of local musicians and the people who still love it live.

Nostalgia abounds in Bob Dylan’s eclectic and eccentric collection of impressive musical appreciations.

... an entire tome of wild, erratic writing about music that is sure to bedazzle and befuddle.

Though this survey is allegedly about other people’s work, it plays as a fractured memoir and punch list of nightmares. Dylan writes here about sixty-six songs, most recorded in the fifties or sixties, and what begins as a set of interpretations ends up as a sour little diary.