Don't think twice, Bob Dylan's still all right It even has a soaring bridge section, a rarity from a composer who once claimed no song could be improved by a middle eight, although he has written some beautiful ones (the dramatic, woozy shift of Just Like a Woman, for example). But then he has written a lot of songs - "thousands" according to Dylan himself , 458 according to calculations of Dylanologists, released on 34 studio albums, plus 13 live albums and nine official bootleg compilations over 50 years. "He's kind of our American Beatle," says Josh Homme, the maverick leader of US rock band Queens of the Stone Age. He's got so many songs and he traverses such a wide array of music that you can just go on a journey with him in search of America. Lyrically, he is supreme. The Queens contribute a hard-riffing, garage rocking version of Outlaw Blues to a new compilation, Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan, released next week as a benefit for the 50th anniversary of Amnesty International. More than 80 artists have recorded covers, with everyone (including Dylan) paying their own costs and forgoing royalties to keep the four-CD compilation attractively priced. Dylan is a good fit with Amnesty, a charity dedicated to helping political prisoners. He may have quickly moved on from the restrictions of topical protest songs in the first phase of his career, yet he remains a political writer in a deeper sense, because he compels listeners to look at the world in new ways and continually challenges assumptions. US pop-rock outfit Maroon 5 power up the anthemic I Shall Be Released, yet the dazzling range of the 72 featured songs demonstrate how hard Dylan really is to define. Marianne Faithfull performs a lovely, understated cover of Baby Let Me Follow You Down . "It's a funny, sexy little song," says Faithfull, who recorded Blowin" in the Wind as her second single in 1964. She became friends with Dylan, who famously wrote her a poem, then tore it up when she wouldn't sleep with him. That was a shame. Mad poet in a terror! But we were all young then. She says Dylan is hard to describe. He's like so many different things; he just changes so much. He's a very grand old man now but in his youth he really was a shape-shifter. He is elusive even within his own work because he has the Shakespearian quality of viewing things through a multi-faceted prism, where opposites are given equal weight, and (as Keats said of the Bard) he is "a man capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason." "He brought poetry into pop music," says Bryan Ferry, who contributes a drifting, melancholic version of the wistful Bob Dylan's Dream. Ferry has recorded many Dylan covers, including the 2007 album Dylanesque. I got drawn in by the possibilities of these amazing words. Contrary to many people's opinions, I think he has melodic gifts. A lot of his songs are very beautiful. They seem to get deeper as you get older. This quality of deepening has surely something to do with the roots of the music, the sense that the past shapes the present. Jazz singer and pianist Diana Krall covers the mournfully sad Simple Twist of Fate, a song she arrived at "sort of backwards. I discovered Bob later in musical life because I was studying jazz, listening to Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane. But, especially on his later records, I can hear these influences. You start to realise that he must have been listening to this at earlier times, and all sorts of musical influences have gone in. What comes out is the same music in a different form. Dylan's music reaches back through the popular forms of the 20th century, into 19th-century folk and vaudeville and beyond. Guitarist Charlie Sexton, who has been playing in Dylan's bands on and off since the Eighties, recalled jam sessions when Dylan "would just pick up his guitar and start singing and playing without any introduction or explanation. I'd keep asking him, 'Is this one yours?" and he'd just mumble in that gravelly voice, 'Nah, it's from the Civil War." " The most striking thing about the sometimes uneven interpretations of Chimes of Freedom is how open his work is to new and different possibilities, sweeping listeners from the oldest of musical traditions to the karaoke bars of the 21st Century (where, according to a survey by karaoke website Lucky Voice, Make You Feel My Love was the second most popular choice of 2011). "Singing Dylan, it's a different form," says Krall. You're telling a story in different rhythms in different verses. It's hard to describe: it's like singing Beowulf or something," says Krall. This stuff goes deep.