... makes phenomenally captivating reading for any Dylan devotée, revealing unseen dimensions of the mercurial Nobel laureate, and much to surprise and delight even careful readers of Heylin’s earlier work ... represents a dramatic shift away from the oral history that informed Behind the Shades, and updates Heylin’s take on Dylan with more than the new material unearthed in the Dylan Archive. The new book also considers the range of Dylan scholarship, analysis, and biographical works produced in the last 20 years, and presents itself to a great degree as a corrective to faulty and misleading memories and myths made real by endless retelling ... the real excitement and joy of this book emerges from Heylin’s discussion and analysis of copious party tapes, bootlegs, between-takes conversations and outbursts, combative and occasionally revealing interviews, contracts and related documents, and hand-scrawled manuscript revisions that he weaves into a fresh and engaging narrative ... But even after countless Dylan biographies—two of the best of them by Heylin himself—in A Restless, Hungry Feeling, the journey through Dylan’s back pages to these familiar moments reads like a story untold.

If anyone is entitled to write this exhaustive biography, it’s the man who was described by Rolling Stone in 2016 as 'perhaps the world’s authority on all things Dylan.' And if he is as jaw-droppingly good at his job as his subject is at music, Heylin can also be just as prickly. He takes delicious pleasure in throwing darts at Dylan’s other chroniclers, calling one a 'minor writer,' another a 'largely unloved scribe' ... In other words, this first installment of The Double Life is a twofer: Not just one but two big, colorful egos are on display.

Peppered with fact-checking footnotes to point out where others have got it wrong (or where Dylan has lied), the book really comes alive at the beginning and the end, when Heylin goes beyond the endless details to capture his subject’s situation with sympathy ... some fascinating revelations ... for depth of research alone, is hugely impressive. Unfortunately, it can also be hugely annoying. The tone jumps from lofty to faux hip: people are forever penning this and opining that, while Dylan himself is described as a 'young tyke' twice in the space of two pages. Heylin has got to the bald truth, not by speaking to Dylan (who cannot be trusted), but by scraping through his relics. And everything he has found is put on display rather than buried into the story. It is the opposite approach to Dylan, who hid the truth to let the magic shine ... I can’t share Heylin’s astoundingly high regard for his own work, but if you do want to strip away the mystery and get a logbook on Dylan’s inescapable reality in time for his 80th birthday in May, this is the one for you.

More than a conventional, or conventionally readable, biography, A Restless, Hungry Feeling feels more like a hefty appendix to extant Dylan bios, or an advanced research seminar in Dylanology ... Heylin, like anyone who cares even a little bit about Bob Dylan, takes for granted that his subject is a master fabulist, if not a compulsive liar ... Rifling through old letters and contracts for clues to the 'real' Dylan can feel a little beside the point, like fact-checking The Iliad against archaeological excavations from ancient Greece. Does Heylin expect to find some smoking gun, a scrawl in an old journal reading, 'I am going to make a point of performing my identity, to vex and frustrate the public, and particular critics and biographers?' Such a po-faced confessional seems unlikely, and Heylin knows it. Even the titular 'double life' conceit of these new biographies seems insufficient for an artist who recently boasted of containing multitudes ... Heylin’s book betrays the frustration of this knowledge. It’s riven with the sort of nastiness that marks first-rate obsessives, whose interest in a subject calcifies in time into a thinly veiled hatred, as the object of their affection fails to reveal its fullness ... The feeling that Heylin is spoiling his subject is compounded by the author’s writing, which has its own curdling effect. It’s not long before Heylin’s parenthetical corrections of quotes and typos, and his excessive deployment of '[sic]' seem like little more than rank pedantry ... A pervading sense of mean-spiritedness is never far from these pages. That tone is most obvious in the author’s chary regard of his icon ... Still, Heylin’s claim to be king of Dylanologists may well be apt. If nothing else, A Restless, Hungry Feeling serves as the literary equivalent of being stuck at the bar next to a Dylan Guy: the sort of superfan who bores with tedious trivia and is all too eager to correct any half-formed opinion offered by the more casual listener ... can’t help but slog across land well trodden.

As a prose stylist, Heylin’s a square, his sentences padded out with cliché and hackneyed metaphor...At its absolute nadir, this work, the first volume in a two-part biography of Dylan, reads like an inexplicably angry sessionography. But he is good for the facts ... light on original interviews and, well, descriptions of the music, even, and based more on trawling the archives and other sources for alternative lyrics, correspondence, film outtakes, bootleg recordings and obscure interviews. As such we get lots of details about what might have been written when, and whose memory might be faulty, but not much description of how the songs sound and how the music feels. Heylin is more about puncturing the myths ... If you think of ‘A Restless, Hungry Feeling’ as being written by a Baron Corvo-esque self-aggrandising maniac obsessively accumulating facts in order to match the creative hysteria that took Bob Dylan to the edge of vision, then it all starts to make some kind of sense. Indeed, it might be worth it alone for him alerting me to the Stuttgart 1991 show, where an eight-minute rendition of ‘New Morning’ contained ‘not a single intelligible line’. Thanks mate!

Virtually no one has written as much about Bob Dylan as Heylin, yet he has more to say ... It’s always been difficult to separate fact from fantasy when considering this iconic songwriter and performer, but, as always, Heylin separates the chaff from the wheat. Full of dizzying amounts of detail and plentiful anecdotes, the result is an exhaustively meticulous but thoroughly entertaining account of the early to middle years of the elusive Mr. Dylan. We may never really get to know him, but Heylin may well have taken us as close as we can get. A must for Dylan fans and for admirers of Heylin’s work and a mesmerizing triumph.

Heylin’s endeavor to understand all things Dylan might never be fully realized, but this book is filled with absorbing details that help flesh out this most elusive of characters. What sets the book apart from other biographies is Heylin’s access to Dylan’s archive, held temporarily at Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum, with its collection of manuscripts, recordings, and outtakes from documentaries ... Dylan remains an enigmatic figure. Heylin’s book will be appreciated by devoted fans and is another valuable addition to a puzzle that might never be completed.

Even with those documents, not to mention Dylan’s own autobiography, Chronicles, and hundreds of interviews and press conferences over the years, the story of how Bobby Zimmerman from Minnesota became one of music’s most influential and enduring artists remains murky. To his credit, Heylin leans into the confusion, documenting who said what and how they would know even though it makes some parts, especially the chapters on Dylan’s early years, hard to follow. We still don’t even get a straight story on the origin of the name change ... Heylin is on stronger footing in his discussions with eyewitnesses and analysis of documentary footage and studio recordings from sessions for such classics as 'Like a Rolling Stone' or 'Visions of Johanna.' In these passages, the narrative becomes an enlightening, informative delight ... Impressively researched, this deep look at Dylan’s early career and initial stardom is a decidedly uneven but enjoyable ride.