Neil McCormick of
The Daily Telegraph awarded the book a full five stars, and described it as "an excuse for the great man to write with joyful zest, piercing profundity and flamboyant imagination about whatever crosses his mind".
David Remnick, writing in
The New Yorker, praised it as "a rich, riffy, funny, and completely engaging book of essays". The book was described as "absolutely one of the best books about popular music ever written" by Chris Willman in
Variety.
Rolling Stone included it in a list of the "best music books of 2022". The
Chicago Tribune named it one of the "10 best books of 2022" and the
Sydney Morning Herald named it one of 10 books that "made their mark in 2022". The
Buffalo News cited it as "one of the great books... of the past decade". Jody Rosen of the
Los Angeles Times and Ludovic Hunter-Tilney of
The Financial Times both noted that only four of the songs included were by women, which they interpreted as a "misogynist" oversight on the part of the author. Anne Margaret Daniel, writing in
The Spectator, however, cautioned against looking at Dylan's choice of songs as representing any sort of canon or even list of "favorites", noting that Dylan actually seems to "dislike" some of the selections (e.g.,
Bing Crosby's "
The Whiffenpoof Song" and the
Eagles' "
Witchy Woman"). Daniel noted that Dylan appears to be using this particular set of songs "to illustrate points, to instruct and to entertain, not to...tell us what he likes best". The book debuted at number three on
The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for the week ending November 5, 2022. It spent 10 consecutive weeks on the list. ==Images==