Dylan's Lost Songs, and the Band That Saved Them

The New Basement Tapes was 47 years in the making - but could this supergroup ever have lived up to the hype?

Bob Dylan: principle songwriter

Elvis Costello: vocals, guitar, slide, ukulele, bass on “Liberty Street,” “Nothing To It,” and “Diamond Ring,” organ, Mellotron on “Kansas City”

Marcus Mumford: vocals, guitar, mandolin, drums on “Down On The Bottom,” “Married To My Hack,” “Spanish Mary,” “Liberty Street,” and “Quick Like A Flash”

Rhiannon Giddens: vocals, fiddle, banjo

Jim James: vocals, guitar, bass, organ, Mellotron on “Married To My Hack,” “Spanish Key,” “Liberty Street,” “Hidee Hidee Ho # 11”

Taylor Goldsmith: vocals, guitar, bass, piano, organ

Carla Azar, Griffin Goldsmith, Jay Bellerose: drums

Zach Dawes of The Last Shadow Puppets: bass

Jessica Kiley, S.I. Istwa, and Megan and Rebecca Lovell, AKA Larkin Poe: backing vocals

Special guests: Johnny Depp, guitar on “Kansas City”; HAIM, backing vocals on “Kansas City” and “The Whistle Is Blowing

Produced by T-Bone Burnett

In December of 1965, Bob Dylan sat down for a press conference with KQED in San Fransisco. He was famously bombarded with all sorts of silly questions: “How ‘wasted’ is really ‘wasted,’ and do you foresee it?” “What’s your new album about?” “Would you call your songs ‘folk songs’?”

When asked if words were more important than the music, he said: “The words are just as important as the music. There would be no music without the words.”

That same year, Ben Carruthers set the poem on the back of the Another Side of Bob Dylan LP: a Dylan-ification of blues tune “Jack O’ Diamonds,” to music. Thirteen months after “Jack O’ Diamonds’”s release, in July of ’66, Dylan got in that mysterious motorcycle accident. Whatever happened that day, he saw the opportunity to retreat from the public eye; settling in Woodstock with his wife and children. His touring band The Hawks followed him out there; renting a big pink house in nearby Saugerties. While Dylan had the most fruitful songwriting period of his entire career, Garth Hudson set up a makeshift studio in the basement. There, Dylan and the Hawks – now The Band – workshopped a loose collection of about 100 songs.

Well...we thought there were 100 songs. In 2013, after a bootleg, two studio albums, and 47 years of Basement Tapes mythology, Bob’s publisher found a box of 40 more sets of lyrics, in various stages of completion – or incompletion. This reads like the plot of a movie, but I swear to god it’s true. This is the story of Bob Dylan’s lost songs, and the band that saved them.

“The question to me was: ‘Would you like to do something with these?’ Shocked, I asked if Dylan was into this. Having been told he was, I asked no more questions, but set out to come up with something that would do justice to Dylan and be true to the spirit in which the lyrics were originally written.”

quoted from: T-Bone Burnett, “How I set lyrics for Bob Dylan’s new Basement Tapes to music.” The Guardian, 7/20/2014.

Bob and his publisher handed those lyrics off to an old friend, T-Bone Burnett. If you’ll remember from the Desire episode, he's an alum of Bob’s Rolling Thunder Revue band. From there, T-Bone set out to assemble a supergroup that could set Dylan’s lyrics to music, record them, and release them as an LP. T-Bone called on his old friend Elvis Costello, plus Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, and Rhiannon Giddens; freshly out of Grammy-winning folk group the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Marcus tipped T-Bone off to Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes, and that was the New Basement Tapes. They were all what T-Bone called “music archaeologists.” They had, in one way or another, proven they could honor Dylan’s spirit while bringing something original to the table.

This wasn’t the first project of this nature Dylan was involved with. Of course, there’s “Tears Of Rage” and “This Wheel’s on Fire” on The Band’s Music From Big Pink. Dylan took part in a similar project to The New Basement Tapes himself in 2011; completing Hank Williams's “The Love That Faded” for The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams compilation.

But this was different. These musicians had the opportunity of a lifetime: to collaborate with a 26/27-year-old Bob Dylan, nearly 50 years after the fact. Here’s what each New Basement Tapes member had to say about the project.

Elvis: “You’d be a fool or an arrogant person if you don’t say initially, of course it’s daunting.”

(quoted from: David Bauder, “‘New Basement Tapes’ band takes on Dylan.” Associated Press, 11/11/2014)

Taylor: “I’d never felt more creative and I’ve never felt less comfortable.”

(Associated Press)

Rhiannon: “This is a special opportunity to sort of have all this time with other creative people, and everybody’s bringing a very specific and defined idea of what songwriting is to the table.”

(quoted from: Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes, Continued [dir. Sam Jones, 2014])

Jim: “It’s so fun to see how different each of our songwriting styles are...It’s like seeing the magician. How does the magician really pull the rabbit out of the hat?”

(Lost Songs)

When he arrived at the studio and sat for an interview, Marcus simply said:

“...I’m shit scared!”

(Lost Songs)

Sessions were booked for two weeks at Capitol Studios in Hollywood. Coincidentally, the New Basement Tapes were to record in one of the facility’s basement spaces. As described by Marcus, the group had a unique set of challenges going in. “When you start a band from scratch, you don’t normally expect to have great songs immediately...we arrived and these songs were great. And so making them sound great was our challenge.” In the meantime, the group was sent lyrics for sixteen songs to do as they pleased with. This strategy producedmultiple renditions of the same song; like Taylor’s “Liberty Street” and Elvis’s “Six Months In Kansas City.” Occasionally, members found they independently came up with bang-on phrasings for a certain line; seemingly a testament to the power of the subconscious. “It was like a magic trick,” Elvis said.

All the while, Dylan had no knowledge of what this music was gonna be. But as put by Marcus to the Associated Press, “We aren't looking for any kind of blessing. It would be cool if he likes it, but in a way, he's like everybody else now. He'll hear it in the same light as everyone else.”

Fifteen songs made the cut for the standard edition of The New Basement Tapes’s only album, Lost On The River. Five more were added to the vinyl version here to fill out a double LP. T-Bone’s July 2014 piece for The Guardian uses the wording “the first 20” songs when describing the album; implying there was meant to be a Lost on the River Volume 2 with the rest of them. Eleven years later, this hasn’t came to fruition. What was released was a documentary, Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes Continued, and a commentary track by T-Bone.

His commentary wasn’t much more than him calling every song beautiful. Here’s my actual commentary.

The New Basement Tapes project presents a unique question: what makes Bob Dylan Bob Dylan? The performance aspect is removed from Lost On The River, obviously. We don’t get to hear how Dylan might’vedone these songs because he never recorded them. The music was all up to The New Basement Tapes. All we have are the words. Thankfully, that says an awful lot. Referring to unreleased New Basement Tapes track “When Matthew Met Mary,” Elvis said:

“One of them has a line that goes, ‘A thousand doors couldn’t hold me back from you.’ If you wrote a line like that, you wouldn’t keep it in a drawer for 47 years – unless you were Bob Dylan.”

Sure, these are throwaways. But considering who they came from, they’re not half bad throwaways! Think of Lost on the River as Dylan writing the screenplay and nothing else. T-Bone was producer, and The New Basement Tapes are the directors.

It’s unfair to compare this album to the legend of Dylan. What we can compare it to is the Basement Tapes – the real thing, not the mythology. The Basement Tapes were six guys, one of whom happened to be one of the biggest rock-and-roll stars to ever live. Just shooting the shit, completely without pretenses. No one was afraid of fucking up because no one was gonna hear this stuff anyway, right? Do you really fuck up if no one’s there to see it? The New Basement Tapes, on the other hand, arranged and performed with an audience in mind. These are songs that will be put on an album for mass market release; just like Music From Big Pink was.

Where the Basement Tapes and The New Basement Tapes overlap is how songs came to be. Both groups kinda fumbled their way through stuff they didn’t have a fully-formed vision for. Sometimes the songs didn’t exist until they were being played through. There’s this delightfully chaotic scene in Lost Songs where Elvis is leading the group through the his version of “Florida Key.” There’s like, five million chords and no one really knows what’s going on, not even Elvis, but he sure is confident about it! Though the energy and intent of the creating is different, they share the spirit of collaborative creation. You got me?

Typically, an album’s opening track is its thesis statement. Lost On The River starts with Down On The Bottom, Jim’s first contribution. It seems this was chosen because, according to T-Bone, it was the first song recorded; Rhiannon’s flight hadn’t gotten in yet. Off the bat, Lost On The River’s production is big. It’s super reverb-y; Jim and Elvis’s guitars, vocals, tambourine, bass drum. Almost every single song has two drummers. Here, Jay Bellerose is in one channel, with Marcus in the other.

You might not pin lyrics like, “Down to the last drop in the cup/Down on the bottom, no place to go but up” as screaming DYLAN! The (loose) connection here is Jim’s voice. At certain points, he sounds like Dylan did in that weird 1969/1970 period where he was trying to imitate Rick Danko. Interestingly, Dylan seems to have evolved on this lyric a few years down the line: “Now everything’s a little upside down/As a matter of fact the wheels have stopped/What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good/You’ll find out when you reach the top you’re on the bottom” (eeeeAAAAAAidiot weeeUUUUUNd….) “Down On The Bottom” does just enough to tie Lost On The River to the Dylan canon without making it obvious.

If I heard this at a restaurant where they served $15 truffle fries in a metal cup, I wouldn’t instantly clock this as being Bob Dylan.

Next is Elvis Costello’s first contribution, Married To My Hack. “Hack” has taken on many meanings over the years, but it began as a slang term for a sex worker. Through the 20th century it evolved into an insult you sling at journalists – a much more relevant interpretation when you think of what was going on in Dylan’s life in ’67. Fittingly, Elvis’s speak-sing style sounds more like 1966 Dylan. It’s appropriate for how weird these lyrics are: “I got fifteen women and all of them swimming,” “twelve-wheel drive and an oversized hive.” There’s a lot of words and word play to get through, and this reverb is not helping. It slows all the words down by a hair. But this isn’t sluggish by any means, Elvis saunters his way through the nonsense poetry in two minutes flat while Rhiannon ad-libs and mimics a wah-wah guitar. This album will not be twenty tracks of IPA rock. “Hack” brings the attitude…

...speaking of IPA rock!!

Right. I’m an elder zoomer. I remember the days when you could not escape Babel no matter how hard you tried. Every coffee shop, every “just-two-guys-and-a-crazy-dream!!” mediocre burger joint, every department store. Mumford and Sons wore out their welcome here fast.

Marcus Mumford is the Bruce Springsteen of new Americana. He stadium rock-ified folk, he can sure write an anthem. But when everything is anthemic, it feels insincere. The strict deadline on Lost On The River got Marcus writing more in two weeks than he typically did in six months. Pressure makes diamonds. Kansas City is more or less a typical Marcus song, but here’s the thing: it’s is the only one here. That a., gives us some more stylistic variety to listen to, and b., makes it sincere. “Kansas City” was the radio hit of the album, and I see why. Again, it was 2014, we readily gobbled up everything the stomp-clap-HEY! craze spoon-fed us.

But I have to give Marcus credit where credit is due; of all the twenty-something choruses presented by all fivesongwriters on Lost On The River, this is the one that sticks. “I love you dear, but just how long/Can I keep singing the same old song?” This is Bob speaking to his audience. He didn’t want to sing “Blowing In The Wind” for the rest of his life then, and he doesn’t want to sing “Like A Rolling Stone” for the rest of his life now. “You called me to come, and then I do/Then you say you’ve made some mistake/You invite me into your house/Then you say you gotta pay for what you break” puts to word the testy relationship Dylan had with fans, the media, the music industry, his peers.

If it’s a Marcus anthem, we need all hands on deck; whether that’s a comical amount of mandolins or all the manpower in the studio. HAIM faintly heard on backing vocals, Taylor played piano, Jay on drums. Elvis overdubbed Mellotron, and sent...Johnny Depp?? For some reason?? In his place to play guitar.

Rhiannon’s first contribution to Lost On The River is the sweeping Spanish Mary. “Spanish” introduces trope of the exotic woman, which I totally think as being a Desire-era Dylan thing. “Isis, oh Isis, you mystical child/What drives me to you is what drives me insane…” The titular Spanish Mary is a Helen of Troy-type character; with multiple men going on perilous journeys and making dangerous bargains to win her love.

Rhiannon was especially in touch with the muse. That’s what made her perfect for this project, as did being a relative newbie to the Dylan canon.

“I kind of figured, instead of going and doing a lot of research, everybody else on this project probably knows of this stuff and has heard of this stuff (meaning the original Basement Tapes.) Maybe I could be a voice that’s coming from, kind of, left field.”

quoted from: Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes, Continued (dir. Sam Jones, 2014)

That outside perspective kept things fresh, with her own contributions especially. She wasn’t trying to imitate any Dylan era, subconscious or not. “Spanish” is more dramatic than the bard would dare; haunting banjo, goosebump-inducing guitar, booming drums. Listen to what Taylor plays on bass, pay attention to how he moves the mood. Rhiannon’s voice does things most mortals cannot. Listen to how she employs dynamics through, “With cargo they did carry...” and vibrato to accentuate one of the best lyrics on the whole record: “Beggar man, beggar man/Tell me no lie/Is it a mystery to live/Or is it a mystery to die?” Elvis’s guitar leads the instrumental refrain; a restrained, foreboding freakout. As a whole, “Spanish” is striking.

Next is Liberty Street...Taylor’s Version. HA. I couldn’t resist! With Larkin Poe on backing vocals.

Taylor’s piano-driven interpretation has a very end-of-the-TV-show feel. His Lost On The River songs set an awful lot of lyrics to an awful lot of melody. Something about how he applies rhythm to, “Now look here, Baby Snooks/Doesn’t matter what books you keep underneath your seat” is in an almost Billy Joel slant. Keep all this in mind when we talk about Elvis’s version of the same song in a couple sides. I won’t spend too much time on this one because it’s not my favorite of Taylor’s compositions.

The first song on side two is Jim’s Nothing To It. Just a couple days before sessions were set to begin, eight more sets of lyrics turned up. These, “Nothing To It” included, were put together on-the-fly by the New Basement Tapes; no time for premeditated arranging.

If you’ve been around here long, you’ll know I have a soft spot for the late 2000s indie pop boom. “Nothing To It” is everything I hate to love about it; group vocals, chipper trumpet, sunshiney optimism. I have no idea how the millennials felt so secure in what they had. I honestly kind of envy it. The lyrics go along with that spirit: “I knew I was young enough/And I knew there was nothing to it/’Cause I’d already seen it done enough.” It strollsalong happily, with plenty of Jim and Rhiannon singing in unison. All together now!

Elvis's Golden Tom Silver Judas is a bonus track, one of five included to round out a double LP. This was recorded in the B-studio; which wasn’t much more than the break room. This is the totally acoustic number on Lost On The River, and though I love a millennial-rock moment, it came as a breath of fresh air. “Golden Tom” is a sliver of what I loved about The Basement Tapes. It’s spontaneous and undone. Just a guitar and some musicians. The singing members of the New Basement Tapes have nailed their harmonies here, but they’re missing their entrances. It’s delightfully authentic.

And I love a good Dylan love song:

“Buffalo Bill wouldn’t have known what to do

If he got just one look, just one good look at you,

And I don’t know what to do either,

Just want to tell you it’s neither.

Tom said don’t take her, Judas said leave her.”

Both guys told him to walk away in different words, and he did neither.

The romance continues with When I Get My Hands On You, co-written by Marcus and Taylor. (And Bob, of course.) Bob was enjoying domestic bliss with Sara when he first wrote it, Marcus had just married his wife Carrie Mulligan when he recorded it, and Taylor had just met his future wife Mandy Moore. “When I set my eyes on you, gonna keep you out of town at night” really reminds me of “The Man In Me” and the Nashville Skyline/New Morning era. Rhiannon plays this repetitive, beautiful plucked motif on fiddle. She makes this total wedding song material. Where so much of this music is marked by the time from which it came, this is an utterly timeless song on Lost On The River. We have another funny way of Dylan showing his love: “When I get my hands on you, gonna make you marry me...” It’s like screaming "I love you" for the first time in an argument. But Marcus makes it sound so tender.

I do not like Duncan and Jimmy. It’s one of my least favorite contributions of Rhiannon’s, and I feel bad for not liking it; it’s 100% in the vein of her style outside the New Basement Tapes.

The last song on disc one is Florida Key; another utterly timeless contribution thanks to Taylor. His intricate finger-picked part is totally 1963/64 Dylan; those sad romantic songs like “Boots Of Spanish Leather.” Buthaving been spoiled by the demo version in Lost Songs, I wish it was left alone. I don’t think this song needs fiddle, or anything else really. “Florida” tells a sad tale of a lover gone with the wind. Our narrator wanders lost, completely bereft until escaping to the water: “My only darling is gone/Took everything and put it out on the lawn/And Jim came and got it and gave it to John.” It’s a beautiful set of lyrics, with vignettes like “sunshine in my beer” and boys and girls riding on silver goats. It’s like if “Visions of Johanna” if it took place on a hot weekend afternoon in Florida instead of a blizzard in New York.

But I have to say, the line “It’s getting harder and harder to be me” gave me a laugh.

Disc two opens with Jim’s Hidee Hidee Ho. It’s something of a crossover event: Bill Koster of My Morning Jacket came in to play piano, while Taylor’s brother and Dawes bandmate Griffin played drums. I can tell exactly which artists in the New Basement Tapes were profoundly influenced by Dylan, the original Basement Tapes especially. Holy hell, does Jim sound like a Dylan offshoot here. That singing style comes from the back of the throat. Jim plays the Mellotron for like half the album, but this is the first time I’ve been able to actually hear it. There’s not much going on in the lyrics, it’s sort of a “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road” situation. The arrangement gets to shine; summery Mellotron chords, woozy guitar, fiddle, and an extended intimate piano solo.

Next is Elvis’s Lost On The River # 12. This was one of four versions written for the album; only his and Rhiannon’s made the cut. This is one I would love to see Dylan’s lyric sheet for, because according to T-Bone, Elvis wrote a new lyric for this one. But comparing this version to Rhiannon’s, they both have verses the other don’t have! Looking at the lyrics they do share, “I got lost on the river, but I got found,” links it to Dylan’s growing interest in Christianity. Characters from the bible and the theme of salvation show up on the original Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding, and the songs Dylan contributed to Music From Big Pink. For being the title track, this “Lost On The River” feels...I don’t want to say inconsequential. Or derivative. But this isn’t a wow moment in the track listing, and it doesn’t stray far from what Dylan would’ve done. The most exciting moments are when someone goes completely off-script. That’s not to say this is bad. This is one of my favorite Elvis vocal performances here. It’s fragile, soulful, and sincere.

I’ve been flip-flopping on Stranger for a week now, and that’s mostly because of my pride.

On the one hand: I love how the music is played. This is great guitar-playing by Marcus and Taylor. The tone has a ’70s highway tune feel to it, I love when the tones on Lost On The River have an edge. The coda especially gives the song dimension. It’s contrasted by Rhiannon’s fiddle – I swear to god, someone had better build a time machine so she can go back and be in the Rolling Thunder Revue.

And the lyrics. Wow. This feels like “Tangled Up In Blue”’s older cousin. Instead of this fruitless Odysseus journey to get back to his long-lost lover, our narrator’s trying to run from her memory. On the other hand: this sounds so Mumford and Sons millennial-rock formulaic. I’m not “supposed to” like this, am I?

Card Shark is Taylor’s weakest contribution. This isn’t a phenomenal set of lyrics to work with. You can make a good film out of a good edit, but you can’t make a great film out of bad footage. The vocals are really the high point, and there are wonderful moments in the melody Taylor’s written. Like that “Get him in the nose,” whichblooms like a vine towards the sun.

About Quick Like A Flash, T-Bone said: “It felt like what Capitol Studios was made for” It’s super cool, “quick like a flash” (Flash!) “Flash” feels very modern. It builds across three minutes, not wasting a second of run time. Jim’s rougher-around-the-edges vocals shine, and this is another unreasonably good bassline by Taylor. Like distractingly good. “Flash” is a pair of jeans with ten sets of pockets, and Taylor’s found them all. Hidee Hidee Ho # 16’s arrangement is entirely mismatched to the lyrics. I won’t spend much time on this one either. Diamond Ring is another Taylor number; similarly sweet to “Florida Key.” It’s pleasant, wholesome, and cozy. Fine. There are an awful lot of songs referencing gold, silver, weddings, and rings on this album; reflective of Dylan settling into married life with Sara.

The Whistle Is Blowing makes use of another classic Dylan trope: bidding fare-the-well as you send a woman on her way. Marcus’s delivery does justice to the lyric; he’s tender, but you can hear the nod-and-wink. With the rumbling drums, breaking into a spark at the end of the roll, and bar-room-closing feel group vocals, I feel this could’ve been a worthy contender for closing track.

Next is Elvis’s “Liberty Street,” and it’s completely different! So different it was retitled to Six Months In Kansas City. It takes the exact same set of lyrics and puts it to a mid-tempo rocker with like five million chords – this is Elvis Costello we’re talking about, of course there’s five million chords – and a waltz section. Ultimately, I feel “Six Months” doesn’t have the heart Taylor’s “Liberty Street” does, but it’s still a good second-from-closer. Elvis wrote in a line shout for everyone, like the curtain call of the New Basement Tapesproduction.

In Lost Songs, we see T-Bone guiding sessions; but his gentle nudge towards D&J was nearly the death of Rhiannon’s Lost On The River # 20. If not for Marcus advocating for it, it might not have been brought to fruition.

“Duncan and Jimmy” would’ve been Lost On The River’s “Hollywood ending,” but that spirit just isn’t authentic to the source material. The whole point of Bob retreating to Woodstock was to escape the fame machine. This “Lost On The River” reprise is authentic to the Basement Tapes’s history: everyone sat on couches, huddled around one guitar and one mic. Rhiannon’s voice is haunting and dramatic in her lower register; lonely, like a woman wandering the woods in a long black veil. She paints in ink with her voice; dipped in water for the grays in the waves, rich and strong black to render the sticks. With how she lingers on “I got lost on the river, but I got found,” as the backing vocalists whirl through the branches – very Southern Gothic – I imagine this narrator has passed on and found salvation in the afterlife.

While some of Rhiannon’s songs are just not my cup of tea, it’s her I’m left thinking about. I think that’s because she was the only one who went in with no preconceived notions. Her fiddle playing is integral to the album’s atmosphere, her voice is incredible, her best songs are haunting. When I played this album for my mom last weekend, “Spanish” came on and she excitedly asked, “Who’s this singing?” I’m bummed that Rhiannon never really got to capitalize on the clout that came from working on a project with Dylan’s name attached. Her band would’ve been breaking up when The New Basement Tapes was active. Talk about shit timing. She just released a mostly-instrumental album and contributed to the Sinners soundtrack. If you like old-school folk and bluegrass, even the Muscle Shoals soul sound, she did a whole album in that style, check out her stuff.

So did the New Basement Tapes live up to the hype? Of course not. The albums that came out of that period were among the most influential albums in all of rock-and-roll history. People silently hoped for a long-lost sister of “This Wheel’s On Fire,” “I Shall Be Released,” or “All Along The Watchtower” to be tucked away in that box. But with the Complete Basement Tapes officially released just a week before Lost on the River, it became apparent this wasn’t the case. Instead, the New Basement Tapes did something that rarely happens in rock-and-roll history. It took the history of the Basement Tapes and extended it to the fans. While I’m not a die-hard fan of every single song, I’m a die-hard fan of the principle: getting four guys and one great, great broad who never would’ve crossed paths otherwise into a room together, with one of Dylan’s finest sidemen behind the board and a great bunch of material to play with.

While it misses the casual atmosphere, it captures the experimental and the ephemeral of the Basement Tapesperfectly – which was arguably much harder to do. Lost On The River doesn’t doesn’t rewrite history, write the Hollywood sequel, or tie up all the loose ends. Instead, it presented a mystery Dylan die-hards didn’t even know needed solving. It’s one fine footnote.

Personal favorites: “Down On The Bottom,” “Kansas City,” “Spanish Mary,” “Nothing To It,” “Florida Key,” “When I Get My Hands On You,” “Lost On The River # 20”

– AD ☆

Watch the full episode above!

Bauder, David. “‘New Basement Tapes’ band takes on Dylan.” Associated Press, 11/11/2014. https://apnews.com/music-5234f49627c748659cbbe108bb98293f

Burnett, T-Bone. “How I set lyrics for Bob Dylan’s new Basement Tapes to music.” The Guardian, 7/20/2014. https://www.theguardian.com/music/shortcuts/2014/jul/20/lyrics-bob-dylan-new-basement-tapes-t-bone-burnett

Jones, Sam, dir. Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes Continued. Beware Doll Inc.: Prime Video, 2014.

Rogers, Jeffrey Pepper. “Songwriters At Play.” Acoustic Guitar, 4/2015.

Williams, Richard. “Bob Dylan’s New Basement Tapes - a first listen.” The Guardian, 7/16/2014. https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/jul/16/bob-dylan-new-basement-tapes-first-listen

“The New Basement Tapes puts music to Bob Dylan’s lost lyrics.” CBS This Morning Saturday, 12/13/2014. https://www.cbsnews.com/video/the-new-basement-tapes-puts-music-to-bob-dylans-lost-lyrics/

“Info: The Story.” The New Basement Tapes, 2025. https://www.thenewbasementtapes.com/info/