He's 65 years old now and he ain't slowin' down. Anyone thinking deep middle age was going to break Bob Dylan's stride and his will to impose himself as imperiously as possible on his times is mistaken. He set a frightening agenda in the '60s, and while things will never again be as giddy as that, just following the man these days is a full-time job. The situation is not helped by a perpetual raft of books and other assorted product that comes from the commentators. But it's Dylan himself, proving genius never dims, who is shooting sparks.

The last five years especially have seen him advance in a variety of unexpected fields: throwing his worldview out to a million people through his weekly radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, co-writing and starring in a film, Masked and Anonymous (2003), and writing a memoir, Chronicles: Volume One (2004), that astonished with its candour and wild poetic force. Chronicles ranks as one of Dylan's greatest triumphs, as revolutionary and evocative as his best album, the almighty Blood on the Tracks. Not bad for a man of 60-plus, doing about a hundred shows a year and still finding time to pen the odd tune.

The renaissance of Dylan as a recording artist began in 1997 with Time Out of Mind. Before that there had been nearly two decades in the wilderness. There was a scattering of incendiary shows and good songs, but only one great album, Oh Mercy (1989). Time Out of Mind brought us a new Dylan, or a new character Dylan felt conviction enough to play: the grizzled old man. Dylan has always needed a role to project his work into - Woody Guthrie acolyte, folk star, pop star, Nashville country gentleman, troubadour - and all of them elicit songs and a sense of mission from him. With his conversion to Christianity at the end of the '70s he'd run to an identity as far from his early public self as possible, but it still produced a set of forceful songs. The '80s saw him touring with Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead. No role to play there, and no great album came.

I ain't looking for anything in anyone's eyes, rasps a voice like that of an old gambler or sea captain. My sense of humanity has gone down the drain, he says later. And then, I'm just going down the road feeling bad, trying to get to heaven before they close the door. What brought Dylan to the new "old" self of Time Out of Mind one can only guess, but it gave him a voice - the bewildered survivor, wrecked and bemused, death at the door, women giving him trouble, a man in his mid-fifties ready to riff on this heavy load of new emotions. One ready to throw the Bible, the blues and anything else to hand at a world gone wrong and a career run off the tracks. It was magnificent. Here was a Dylan to luxuriate in again, fired up on despair and happy to wallow in every bad feeling he could find. He wrote a startling batch of songs, got Daniel Lanois in to produce it, and kick-started a momentum that runs to the present.

 

Better still is ‘Things Have Changed', a song recorded for the soundtrack to The Wonder Boys (2000) that went on to win Dylan an Oscar. Here is the whole philosophy crunched into a moment. Over four verses, this minor-key blues shuffle offers up one hilarious line after another, as Dylan stacks it with out-the-side-of-the-mouth wisdom, absurd non sequiturs and anything that comes into his head. In so much of his best work, especially in the '60s and '70s, he had the ability to top one great line with another, then often with another, a dazzling display of brilliance that left listeners and his songwriter contemporaries stunned. He's at it again here:

I hurt easy, but I just don't show it
You can hurt someone and not even know it
The next sixty seconds could be like an eternity
Going to be low down, going to fly high
All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie
I'm in love with a woman who doesn't even appeal to me

The voice is dusty, close-miked; Dylan judges to the millisecond when to drop another bomb over the melody. The chorus is the payoff, an encapsulation of his post-'97 mood and a repudiation, right down to the obvious play on ‘The Times They are a-Changin'', of once-held ideals: