Bob Dylan is sharing the rest of his Basement Tapes. Four decades after the singer released 24 songs under that title – cuts he recorded with the Band in upstate New York – his label have agreed to unveil 114 more tracks from the same 1967 sessions.



“Some of this stuff is mind-boggling,” Sid Griffin, author of the set’s liner notes, told Rolling Stone. Packaged under the title The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11, the six-CD set incorporates alternate versions of Blowin’ In The Wind and It Ain’t Me Babe, covers of tunes by Johnny Cash and Curtis Mayfield, and at least 30 tracks that Rolling Stone claims “even fanatical Dylan fans never knew existed”. A shorter, two-disc compilation, The Basement Tapes Raw, will present 12 of the unreleased tracks alongside the original LP.



Almost all of this material was harvested from reel-to-reel tape: 20 tapes in all, which the Band’s Garth Hudson kept stored in his Woodstock home. Jan Haust, a Toronto-based collector, acquired the archive about 10 years ago; he worked with Dylan’s reps to find a way to put them out. Although a few tapes were allegedly missing, and a handful of recordings “just [sounded] like a distortion”, everything else is making its way to the public. “We usually curate these packages more, but we knew the fans would be disappointed if we didn’t put out absolutely everything,” an unnamed Dylan source told Rolling Stone.



Fans of The Basement Tapes have always known that there was unreleased material. There have been several expanded, bootleg editions over the years, and musicians have even turned their attention to Dylan’s unreleased Basement Tapes-era lyrics. Earlier this year, T Bone Burnett collaborated with Marcus Mumford, Elvis Costello and others to record their own versions of his incomplete songs. “The stuff that people haven’t heard justifies, in every way, shape and form, all the hype, hubris and myth that surrounds these tapes,” Griffin promised.



Moving forward, Dylan’s archivists are hoping to assemble unused material from 1975’s Blood on the Tracks sessions. “The unheard stuff from there is crazy,” said Rolling Stone’s source. “You can hear the first day of recordings before they put all that echo on.” According to a report in January, Dylan’s camp is also preparing a documentary about the Rolling Thunder Revue, a caravan concert tour from 1975, where Dylan played alongside Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, a 20-something T Bone Burnett, and guest stars like Allen Ginsberg and Harry Dean Stanton. Some of the audio recordings were previously released on Dylan’s Bootleg Series Vol 5, from 2002.



The Basement Tapes Complete and The Basement Tapes Raw are out on 4 November with Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings.

