Dylan was being asked about it in the interview because his “Murder Most Foul” song had included the lines “Play Don Henley, play Glenn Frey / Take it to the limit and let it go by.” One of the more surprising songs on the list may be the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” - surprising if for no other reason that that, in a 2021 interview, Dylan cited three other Eagles songs as his favorites of the group’s: “New Kid in Town,” “Life in the Fast Lane” and “Pretty Maids in a Row” (the last of which he said “could be one of the best songs ever”).

He dips into the punk/new wave era for Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up” and the Clash’s “London Calling.” The two most recent songs on the list are “It Doesn’t Hurt Anymore,” recorded by Regina Belle in 1989, and Warren Zevon’s “Dirty Life and Times,” from his 2003 farewell album “The Wind.”

But the majority of songs are from the ’50s through ’70s, a golden age for rock, pop, soul and country. Blues, R&B and hillbilly songs from the first half of the 20th century figure in heavily. The oldest song on the list is Stephen Foster’s “Nelly Was a Lady,” written in 1849, followed by “The Whiffenpoof Song” from the early 1900s. There are four songs associated with Elvis Presley (“Money Honey,” “Blue Moon,” “Viva Las Vegas”), three made popular by Ray Charles (“Come Rain or Come Shine,” “I Got a Woman,” “You Don’t Know Me”) and two from the Frank Sinatra catalog (“Strangers in the Night,” “Without a Song”).

He plays some favorites among recording artists, if not necessarily songwriters themselves. An announcement in March said that the book will constitute “a master class on the art and craft of songwriting,” as Dylan “analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal.” The announcement further declared that while the essays “are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition.”

Pretty ricky new album songs