As an expression of “retromania,” it’s an unusually forward-looking one.

In announcing his new label, Electromagnetic Recordings, producer/performer/pop-cultural big shot T Bone Burnett also oh-by-the-way’d his next big project: “completing” Bob Dylan and The Band’s venerated Basement Tapes.

As the admirably hyperbole-free release explains: “Bob Dylan’s music publishing company recently discovered lyrics Dylan wrote in 1967 for informal sessions with members of The Band that later became known as The Basement Tapes. Dylan has entrusted Burnett with these lyrics, and early next year — nearly 47 years since the legendary original sessions — Burnett will assemble a select group of contemporary recording artists in the famed Capitol Studios to complete the songs and record them as a band.”

Given that Burnett has worked with everyone from Gregg Allman and Robert Plant to Justin Timberlake and Taylor Swift, the possibilities are, at the very least, intriguing.

The undertaking also represents what is arguably the only opportunity of its kind in post-World War II popular music: a chance to expand a collection of work that has attained almost mythical status yet is riddled with shortcomings.

As Michael Gray, author of the indispensable The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, wrote about the album that belatedly appeared eight years after the 1967 recordings took place, The Basement Tapes is “Essential stuff, badly compiled.”

I emailed Gray, a Brit who now lives in France, to solicit his opinion about the project, but he quite rightly demurred, replying it was “all too much to surmise.”

“Are they finished lyrics, or unfinished? How long has Dylan’s office been knowingly sitting on these? . . . Did Dylan decide not to bother working on them and was it his suggestion that they use T Bone?” were just a few of the not insignificant unknowns he flagged.

Another peculiarity about The Basement Tapes . . . Continued: The original sessions — which took place near Woodstock in 1967 while Dylan was recuperating from his mysterious motorcycle crash — exuded an intangible quality because, as Robbie Robertson tells Greil Marcus in The Old, Weird America, “we weren’t doing anything we thought anybody else would ever hear, as long as we lived.”

The “continuation,” on the other hand, will be birthed under the opposite conditions. There will be recording sessions booked in a proper studio, “as well as a documentary film and book of photography” by Sam Jones, best known for directing Wilco’s unblinking I Am Trying To Break Your Heart.

In fact, Wilco’s collaboration with Billy Bragg in completing a clutch of unrecorded lyrics by Woody Guthrie may be one of the few parallel endeavours to the Burnett/Dylan project. It also has a nice circularity about it: Dylan was offered the chance to finish Guthrie’s long-forgotten words decades before Wilco and Bragg got to them.

During one of Dylan’s hospital visits with Guthrie, who passed away in the same year the Basement Tapes were being recorded, “Woody had told me about some boxes of songs and poems that he had written that had never been seen or set to melodies — that they were stored in the basement of his house in Coney Island and that I was welcome to them,” Dylan wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, Chronicles. He dutifully ventured out there, but Guthrie’s wife, Margie, wasn’t home. He left empty-handed.

In revisiting that, or any, era, there’s a risk of creating “new old music made by young musicians who draw heavily on the past, often in a clearly signposted and arty way,” as critic Simon Reynolds writes about the titular affliction in Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. That could be the inevitable — and not necessarily undesirable — upshot of Burnett’s endeavours.

Then again, from his stint as guitarist/pianist on Dylan’s mid-’70s Rolling Thunder Revues all the way through to next month’s Coen Brothers movie, Inside Llewyn Davis — set in the same Greenwich Village folk scene that shaped Dylan’s early career and for which Burnett executive-produced the newly released soundtrack — Burnett seems to have been building up his credentials for just such an audacious task.

Of course it helps that Dylan has spent years liberating his canon by treating it with almost systematic irreverence, rendering unrecognizable his most famous songs in concert and leasing his music to the likes of Cadillac and Victoria’s Secret.

Even the carnivalesque album cover for the original Basement Tapes album seems partly designed to repel any reverence for the contents within.

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“There was also something disquieting,” Michael Gray observed, “about the specially posed cover photos,” which were shot after the fact in L.A. in the basement of the YMCA, “. . . a suggestion here that Dylan was at once packaging and repackaging his own myth.”

Perhaps the time has finally come for someone else to fill that role.

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