Elvis Costello leaned forward in his chair to address the small gathering in a West London recording studio on the subject of a bunch of hitherto unknown Bob Dylan lyrics dating from 1967. “One of them,” he said, “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.”



The lyrics, two dozen of them, were scribbled down during the summer that Dylan was hunkered down in the basement of Big Pink, a house in upstate New York, recording the collection of songs that became known as The Basement Tapes. Recently, in one of the startling decisions that have marked the latter years of his career, he sent them to the producer T-Bone Burnett, suggesting that he might find a use for them.

Thinking he might get them set to music, Burnett contacted a group of sympathetic songwriters – Costello, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons and Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes – and set them to work, with a plan to convene at Capitol Records’ Los Angeles studio and concoct an album or two out of the results. The first of them will be released later this year, under the title Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes Vol 1.

Each musician, Burnett explained to the audience in the studio, was free to have a go at whichever lyrics they fancied. As a result there were sometimes three or four radically different settings of the same words. Costello, however, pointed out how uncanny it was that two or three of them would sometimes come up with virtually identical melodic phrases for the same “key cadence” in a song: “It was like a magic trick.”

Burnett pointed out that the recordings – made in a basement studio, using real tape – offered his chosen songwriters an unusual opportunity to collaborate with the 27-year-old Dylan. “Everybody brought their A game,” he said. “But you don’t record all 44 versions of these songs in 12 days by being precious about it.”

Nevertheless the playback of an 11-song rough running order demonstrated that, unlike its predecessor, Lost on the River is a finished product. It would be a pointless affectation to imitate the rough and ready quality of the 100-plus songs recorded during that summer during which Dylan was recuperating firstly from fractured vertebrae suffered in a motorcycle crash, and secondly from the chemically fuelled intensity of his rise to world fame; exploring the constituent parts of his music in the company of Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson, and inventing not just the bootleg phenomenon but also the back-to-the-roots movement now loosely known as "Americana" in the process.

T-Bone Burnett … Overseer of Dylan's lyrics. Photograph: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for AFI Photograph: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for AFI

At this stage, even the most optimistic Dylanologist would not expect their hero to have a bunch of forgotten Desolation Rows or I Shall Be Releaseds mouldering in the attic, and the lyrics he passed on to Burnett are unlikely to provoke a radical reconsideration of his artistic development. There are indeed some nice lines, like these from the title track, which Costello set to a tune featuring a very un-Dylanish chromatic melody, teamed with a country-soul chorus that would not be out of place on a James Carr or Percy Sledge record: “Tears of loneliness hidden within/ As he goes from one woman to the next … Then falls in love with one/ It’s hard but true/ But it’s so much harder when the woman is you.”

Songs that stuck in the memory after a single listening included James’s Down on the Bottom, whose howling slow-motion rockabilly guitars and sepulchral echo cry out for the appearance of Roy Orbison; the sitting-on-a-barbed-wire-fence mood of Costello’s Married to My Hack; Giddens’s Spanish Mary and Duncan and Jimmy, with their banjo and fiddle and keening lead vocals; and Mumford’s sweet, ardent Kansas City.

It’ll be a nice record: something of a credit to all concerned, although Dylan’s motivation is likely to remain a mystery. Perhaps it will encourage him to fill the most glaring hole in the list of his official releases: a complete set of those extraordinary original Basement Tapes to replace the unsatisfactory official double album compiled by Robertson on behalf of Columbia Records in 1975. Here’s hoping.