'You got a habit, a bad habit. You fell in love with the hard stuff. You fell for the foxy harlot, the vamp who lives around here somewhere, and you’re silly about her, she’s got you hooked.’

Those words, straight out of some 1950s film noir, are by Bob Dylan, and they open his discussion of a famous song from a Broadway musical that no one, I imagine, has previously considered in quite these terms. My Fair Lady is hardly classic noir. Dylan, though, isn’t concerned with the musical but with Vic Damone’s 1956 recording of ‘On the Street Where You Live’, a song that does indeed nowadays sound as though it were about stalking.

Songs may be about things, but, like all music, they also are things. They are mechanisms with working parts, and Dylan is good at revealing these. ‘On the Street Where You Live’, for example, ‘is all about the three-syllable rhyme: street before, feet before, heart of town, part of town, bother me, rather be’. And then, because he’s Dylan: ‘Vic Damone. Sick at home.’

In The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan writes about songs composed by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, Stephen Foster, Big Bill Broonzy, Billy Joe Shaver, Rodgers and Hart, and Doc Pomus (to whom the book is dedicated), as sung by the likes of Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Nina Simone, Marty Robbins, the Clash, and Little Richard. The singer is as important as the song, because each version of a popular song will be different. Dylan underlines this when he writes that Roy Orbison’s ‘Blue Bayou’ is ‘both a spectacular song and a spectacular record’.