Bob Dylan's thrilling basement tapes blues Burnett assembled some of his favourite songwriters, all band leaders and multi-instrumentalists, in the basement of the Capitol studio in LA to record a belated sequel. The band features Elvis Costello, Marcus Mumford (of Mumford & Sons), Jim James (My Morning Jacket), Rhiannon Giddens (Carolina Chocolate Drops) and Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes). "None of us felt we were dealing with something sacrosanct," says Costello. There's a sense of playfulness in the folio. They range from the completely barmy to wonderful, beautiful, well-constructed lyrics that are right there waiting to be sung. We were walking in, all this time later, to find ideas in a box and turn them into songs. Lost on the River: the New Basement is a fantastic, free-flowing, shape-shifting work of Americana. "I think Dylan's off-cuts are better than anyone else's prime cuts," says Marcus Mumford. Some were undeveloped but others were complete ideas that never saw the light of day. There was enough to write 40 songs, which is extraordinary, because that was like one summer's writing for him. It was a fascinating period of his life. He spent the summer of love holed up in a house while everyone else was down the road at Woodstock dropping acid and taking their clothes off. Reading through the lyrics, I think there's a conflict. He has post-tour blues, where you come off the road and it's a weird adjustment to normal life. He was really relishing it, newly married and enjoying domesticity and rural life. But you can see him battle with it too. Mumford performed with Dylan at the Grammy Awards in 2012 and vividly recalls their first encounter. We were in a rehearsal studio in LA and there was no sign of the great man, just two packets of cigarettes, an ashtray and a microphone, right in the middle of the room. So I went out the toilet and there was this figure hunched over in a chair in a coat with the hood up, chain-smoking cigarettes. I figured it was someone in the crew having a bad day and I just walked past. And as I was in the toilet, I thought, oh s---, that's Dylan! I waited for about five minutes because I didn't want to have wet hands when I first shook his hand. Dylan remains fascinatingly inscrutable to the young English folk-rock star. He can be aloof, because he's Bob Dylan, but it's like a switch, and suddenly he's the most engaged, intelligent, articulate person in the world. And then the switch will go off, and he'll just grunt. It's so bad-ass. "He is definitely set apart, he is touched," says Burnett. He's the smartest person I know in music. He thought some of these lyrics may have been too personal for Dylan to record at the time. Burnett interprets the breezy Nothing To It as a declaration of Dylan's intimations of his own genius. The bittersweet Kansas City, he felt, was a riposte to old associates. "In 1967, he had gone, in five years, from being an obscure folk singer to an international rock "n" roll icon of the highest magnitude. And, in the process, his original supporters turned on him and it seems like he's saying: 'Just how long can I keep singing the same old song? There's a great line: 'You invite me into your house / then you say you got to pay for what you break. I think that resonated very strongly with Marcus, because he has had a similar trajectory. He came out of the box very strong, became internationally successful and suffered an extreme backlash. Kansas City is his song as well. For Costello, Dylan's manuscripts proved key to the writing process. We were originally handed a sheet of typescripts and transcriptions. And actually, when it came to making an emotional connection with something written so long ago, the final piece of the puzzle was to see the handwritten originals. Because then you see the rhythm, you see choices being made on the fly because there are crossed out words. That's a glimpse into the working method that you usually don't get. You could see where thoughts were joined together, where the emphasis was placed a bit more. Quite a lot of the sheets had little doodles and just the kind of things I would find my own notebooks. Costello suggests a degree of irreverence was vital to the process. We didn't hire a cabin in the woods and imagine ourselves back into a kind of imitation. It shouldn't become too precious. You can't worry that you are tampering with a classic canon, those big headlines are a little bit like tombstones, they're epitaphs for the arts of songwriting. As far as I know, Bob Dylan is a living artist, writing new songs and redefining old ones. It runs counter to the idea of making a definitive statement, because it's actually moving all the time. If Bob Dylan is a benchmark, what happens if we saw the legs off the bench? What does it become then? Is it just a lower benchmark? Or is there a higher one? If we throw it in the ocean and it floats away, does it become a ship? To me, this is just some words and music that I care about. Lost on the River: the New Basement Tapes" is released by Island on Nov 17. The Bootleg Series Vol 11: the Basement Tapes Complete" is released out on Columbia