With over 600 song credits to his name, comparing Bob Dylan to his contemporaries seems like a fool’s errand.

There are rare days when I feel like magic is real, and I get to experience something I know very well, with new ears, as if I’m listing to it for the first time. This feeling balances on the razor’s edge between nostalgia and renaissance, often leading to intense bouts of obsession.

We all do it. Books, films, and plays enter our lives at the same time, and we conflate the characters, the setting, the history. For me, one such example is the connection between the Paris and New York diaries of Ned Rorem and the plot of the Talented Mr. Ripley.