As the familiar opening notes of the standard "When You're Young At Heart" on Bob Dylan's new album Fallen Angels ring out, the anticipation mounts. You know the song. You've heard it a thousand times before, whether you wanted to or not. But what is Bob Dylan going to do with something so familiar? You have to wonder, what is someone who seems so unknowable doing singing a song so well known?

"Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, when you're young at heart."

There they are: those familiar words. And yet, something feels completely different. Unlike those of so many of his peers, Bob Dylan's second standards album isn't a schmaltzy, big budget, tweaked-to-perfection affair. Instead it's raw and intimate and immediate, much like last year's Shadows in the Night. Whereas Shadows felt like it was constantly tiptoeing on a razor's edge, here the playing is delicate, with simple arrangements that pack a huge punch. But what stands out most of all are Dylan's vocals.

"Who among his peers would so fearlessly put himself out there, raw and unadorned, delivering songs that are in our collective DNA?"

That's right: Dylan's vocals. Reportedly, Dylan cut the vocals live in the studio with the band. No headphones. No fixes. Just a singer and a batch of great songs, delivering performances that fill you with excitement or joy when they're supposed to and break your heart when they need to.

Bob Dylan turns 75 today. Who among his peers would so fearlessly put himself out there, raw and unadorned, delivering songs that are in our collective DNA?

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Don't buy the oft-repeated criticism of Dylan's voice. It's peerless here, as it always has been. Perhaps because we focus on Dylan's amazing songs—or even his enigma—we've all fallen into the trap over the years that Dylan isn't a great singer. As with all things that are part of Dylan's legend (good or bad), it's not as simple as that. And here, delivering classics rather than songs of his own for us to pick apart, the evidence is plain: Along with being the greatest songwriter of the last 50 years, Dylan is the best singer, too.

"Bob Dylan is a great singer," says John Doe of X, who also provided the singing vocals for one of the Dylan-inspired characters in Todd Haynes's anti-biopic I'm Not There. "He's not just a great songwriter. He's a great singer. Even in the early days, when everybody said, 'He can't sing. He has a weird tone.' Sure he has a different tone, but he hits all the notes, and every time he stands at the microphone he treats it like it's his last performance."

From the outset, critics lambasted Dylan's vocal style. But Doe is right that every song Dylan sang was like a do-or-die situation. If you need proof, just dial up The Cutting Edge: 1965-1966, the twelfth volume in Dylan's long-running Bootleg Series; it compiles every note Dylan recorded in the studio throughout those potent years, during which he released the astonishing and timeless Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. On every single take Dylan delivers a fully realized performance—even when he's seemingly just trying to find the song.

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"It mystifies me how Bob Dylan is able to start from the beginning every time," Doe continues. "Every time he sings a song it's like he's never sung it before. That's why people at his shows are always saying, 'What song was that? What the fuck?' It's because the way he's phrasing it is so upside down you're always wondering how he just did what he did. He's amazing. He's something special."

"I've got bootlegs from the 1966 tour, and the energy is just fantastic—not the electric sets with The Band, but his acoustic sets," says author Jon Savage, whose recent book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded examines that crucial year in Dylan's legend. "I think the real genius is in the acoustic segment of the show, and that The Band was fantastically overrated. I can see why fans were furious with Dylan. They wanted to hear him."

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But it wasn't just a single moment in time that made Dylan's legend. It was the nimble way in which he leaped from folk to rock to country to gospel, and back again over the course of his career, changing his singing and playing style at every turn, and with each detour leading down a road full of musical treasures for his legions of fans.

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"Hank Williams and Bob Dylan are the bar [to me]," country legend Rodney Crowell told me while discussing the recent biopic about Williams on which he acted as executive music producer. "As an artist, as a songwriter, as a performer, and as a singer, if you're not shooting for the bar those two guys set, then to me you're selling yourself short—and you're selling the craft and the gift short. The first time I heard Bob Dylan, it was Bringing It All Back Home and 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'. I easily played it twenty times, no exaggeration. But everything that he does, there's always something in it. 'I used to care, but things have changed'—from just a few years ago—man, to me I was as drawn to that as I was to 'Subterranean Homesick Blues.'"

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Even the seemingly bizarre detours in Dylan's career are full of unexpected gifts, Crowell says. "I stumbled onto one of his Christmas videos recently: 'Must Be Santa Claus'. That's an artist who's always showing us the way. I don't know the guy. I've never met him. I don't know if he's truly a contrarian, as people seem to think, but that was just a brilliant stroke of art as far as I'm concerned."

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In 2013, Columbia Records released The Complete Album Collection, Volume One, which compiled all 35 of Dylan's studio albums, his six live albums, and a compilation of rarities. For everything you think you know about someone as famous as Dylan, it's a treasure trove of forgotten—or simply passed over—gems.

Intimidated? Need a place to start? Even the periods widely considered as fallow for Dylan—the 1980s and 1990s—are full of amazing performances. In fact, the Dylan fan community Johanna's Visions conducted a poll of Dylan aficionados and have done the heavy lifting for you:

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But perhaps it's the very boundaries Dylan has created around himself, not to mention the sheer volume of his work since his debut in 1962, that have led to the overly simplistic view of Dylan as a performer and singer.

"There's such an extraordinary mystique around Dylan, for all the many millions of words that have been written about him: He has a unique place in the pop cultural imagination," author Barney Hoskyns, whose new book Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock examines Dylan's Woodstock years and the mark he left on the bucolic Upstate New York town so synonymous with him. "I think that if you trace it back to the beginning of the Woodstock story, it's born in secrecy. That's the inception of it: That Dylan is hiding away there, and you're not supposed to know where he is."

The pressures of fame had begun to take their toll on Dylan's main facets: the songwriter, the performer, the singer. "He was just this one lone artist experiencing something unlike anyone, even Elvis, had ever experienced," Hoskyns explains. "He wasn't one of four Beatles or five Rolling Stones. He was on his own. So he retreated and led a fairly normal, domestic life with his wife at the time, and made some music with The Band under relatively relaxed circumstances. But he couldn't sustain that. As Joan Baez has said, Dylan has a restless mind that is just not able to sit still within that sort of comfort zone. He was going to sabotage his own domestic bliss, ultimately."

"There's such an extraordinary mystique around Dylan, for all the many millions of words that have been written about him"

Dylan, as always, was moving on. Ahead of him was a long performance career: a reunion mega-tour with The Band, a messy divorce and confessional albums, a tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Traveling Wilburys, the Neverending Tour, a return to his folk roots and a comeback album and series of albums in the new millennium, with each release hailed by diehard fans and critics as unrivaled.

But along the way a narrative developed that Dylan couldn't sing—and that it had always been the case. It became so ubiquitous that it became a Saturday Night Live punch line. And yet nothing was further from the truth.

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Among the vast scope of Dylan's recorded output are plenty of examples of his vocal gifts, laying bare the myth that he's been reduced to nothing more than an unintelligible croak. But perhaps the clearest example, and the one that's most often overlooked, are his performances during his "Gospel Years" in the late-1970s, beginning on 1978's Street Legal and continuing on 1979's Slow Train Coming and 1980's Saved, respectively, and the many amazing bootlegs circulating from that era.

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Ultimately, of course, it's a matter of taste. But maybe precisely because Dylan is so unknowable, we've let the legend run amok. Sure, there's no way he could live up to what any of us might want him to be after more than 50 tumultuous years in the spotlight. But for all the songs he's given us, and for all the creative milestones, it's those astonishing vocals that are the true lost gem in Dylan's vast catalog—and they're clearly ripe for re-examination.

Of course, maybe the joke is on us.

"I think Bob Dylan is probably a better, funnier person than people give him credit for," John Doe says. "That MusiCares speech he gave a few years back, where he was honored before the Grammys, and he read this 15-page speech. He made these pronouncements—some of them controversial, I guess—and then he would say, 'anyway.' And when he would say it, he'd pause and drag it out, and it was fucking hilarious. It was great. It was as if he was saying, 'Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I'm the one behind the lectern, so tough shit.' I really loved that and I think that sums up Bob Dylan."

Jeff Slate Jeff Slate is a New York City-based songwriter and journalist who has contributed music and culture articles to Esquire since 2013.

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