In honor of his new Nobel, this hard-core Dylanophile wants to share with you a song or two from each of his many incarnations. Because you deserve to know.

After an initial solo album in which the young [Bob] Dylan was just finding his voice (i.e., reinventing himself from the middle-class Robert Zimmerman into a pseudo-hobo Woody Guthrie), Dylan put out two acoustic albums that forever changed popular music.

[Bob] Dylan's many quotations from classic American roots music (that song is from an album aptly titled Love and Theft) join the aging poet to a tradition that preceded him and hopefully will outlive him as well.

What a miracle, that all we have to do to be beautifully loving creatures is just relax and allow.

Religion is commodified; the educational system is a sham; and yet,[Bob] Dylan wonders, everyone has to stand naked sometime.

The most recent incarnation of [Bob] Dylan has been the traveling journeyman/ charlatan who sings roots music, snarls dark lyrics that make "All Along the Watchtower" sound like a Disney tune, hosts an old-school radio show, and turns up in some unusual places, like ads for Chrysler and Victoria's Secret.

More of the symbols are stock (does [Bob] Dylan really have hogs lying out in the mud somewhere? I doubt it), but that's the point.