"The Basement Tapes"

Sasha Frere-Jones digs into Bob Dylan's "Basement Tapes."  She notes: "Next week, a six-CD set called “The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11,” featuring a hundred and thirty-nine songs, will be released..." 

"...He was rummaging through American popular music to find sounds that might resonate and free him from whatever self he had created. Dylan had débuted as a thinly disguised Woody Guthrie imitator, turned into a folk-song writer of fearsome economy, and was moving into a third phase, which he described, in a 1978 interview, as “that thin, that wild-mercury sound,” referring to albums like “Blonde on Blonde” (1966) and the electric albums before it..."