After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace

Drawing on a wealth of archival material, biographer Polito (Savage Art) reframes Bob Dylan’s “second thirty years” as a period of unprecedented creativity and growth. Arranging the account in a loose and mostly nonchronological structure, Polito plumbs the dizzying array of sources Dylan drew on from 1991 to 2024 as he revised and expanded his body of work. He pulled from Ovid and little-remembered 19th-century Southern poet Henry Timrod to comment on the legacy of slavery in 2006’s Modern Times, for example, and wove F. Scott Fitzgerald, Othello, and other influences into 2001’s Love and Theft, an album at once autobiographical and sweeping in its commentary on race, American history, and popular music. In the process, Dylan mixed so-called “folk process” with literary modernism to further evolve his songwriting style. He also experimented with his performance style, utilizing a broader spectrum of tones with results that could be erratic or memorable (“When he’s on, Dylan empathizes so intensively and absolutely with a song that he disappears inside the instant-upon-instant disclosure of it”). Polito’s analyses are intricate and revealing, if occasionally overwhelming—one chapter spends several pages scrutinizing inscriptions in Dylan’s high school yearbook. Intimate details and astute critiques coalesce into a rich portrait of an artist ceaselessly remaking himself. Dylan devotees couldn’t ask for a more thorough consideration of an under-studied part of his oeuvre. (Jan.)