What do we know about Bob Dylan?

Tom Junod writes about Bob Dylan and what we know and don’t know about him and what that says about our ability to know anything about anyone. Maaaaan. *toke*

Bob Dylan is either the most public private man in the world or the most private public one. He has a reputation for being silent and reclusive; he is neither. He has been giving interviews-albeit contentious ones-for as long as he’s been making music, and he’s been making music for more than fifty years. He’s seventy-two years old. He’s written one volume of an autobiography and is under contract to write two more. He’s hosted his own radio show. He exhibits his paintings and his sculpture in galleries and museums around the world. Ten years ago, he cowrote and starred in a movie, Masked and Anonymous, that was about his own masked anonymity. He is reportedly working on another studio recording, his thirty-sixth, and year after year and night after night he still gets on stage to sing songs unequaled in both their candor and circumspection. Though famous as a man who won’t talk, Dylan is and always has been a man who won’t shut up.

• Bob Dylan
• interviews
• Tom Junod