The first sounds you hear when you drop the needle — or click the digital file — on Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks are guitars ringing and chiming, almost like bells. They serve as a kind of preface or overture or opening statement or call to prayer for what the listener is about to hear: 56 minutes of a journey through dark heat into the heart and soul of an artist at the depths of sadness driving him to the heights of creative achievement.

For a guy who couldn’t really sing and who drifted in and out of key like a drunk on a tightrope, Bob Dylan had an outsized influence on the way the Western world listened to mu