Oh, I am glad he is out there working away.

I think that the crucial point is about changing gears in creativity as you get older. Dylan is famous for the "let it all pour out" method, which works really well for the gushing days of youth; but that does not work for the older writer. The older writer needs to be more, what is the word I want, crafty (craft-y). The creative spring works differently as you get older (turns into a river?). Dylan was always half-careful, half careless, in his perverse way -- it worked much better with the fusions of youth. I am sure he could craft some great songs if he would change gears and work really hard on them. You can see in some recent ones that he gets started on something good, and then loses it -- he always did that, God knows, but the younger kind of creativity can hold the process till the end because there is so much energy in the raw material. It carries you along over the lazy bits. You can't get away with that when you are older. It is a tipoff that Dylan still needs to parasitize other people's structures (he admits this), and the most interesting lyrics of the last few years were shamelessly borrowed from someone else's book).

yours,

Peter T.