Advice to A Young Writer lyrics

On early recordings from before Bob
Dylan's fame you can hear him try to peal
bright & clean as gospel on a Sunday.
His songs with which they still soundtrack movies
about the 60s capture his swallowed
sandpaper period, when he so loved
the lariat of Guthrie's twang & bend.
In Nashville, recording with Johnny Cash
he tried on Elvis & Sam Cooke like suits
that didn't quite fit right, one too roomy,
the other too tight. In the studio
rehearsing "We Are The World" Quincy Jones
stops the tape & requests sing more like Bob
Dylan & Robert Zimmerman replies
I don't know what that sounds like so Stevie
Wonder offers help, does his best Dylan
impression. Invited to write a song
with U2, Dylan belts his verse out, moans
like a traveling preacher, out-Bonos
Bono but doesn't like it & they mix
it as a backing vocal so on "Love
Rescue Me" he sounds like a man singing
in the shower to a stereo bumped
loud in his living room. Then he got old
& his voice brittled in an exact way
like how chance makes a piece of shattered glass
into a poor man's prism. His voice broke
to rumble like a dying truck engine
like Louis Armstrong's once did, like a tear
through sailcloth & it's this bullfrog holler
he's stuck with 20 years now, as if he'd
been marrying & then remarrying
his own voice uncertain he was even
any good at commitment. You can hear
how much he enjoys it, moaning a deep
nasal crackling like Charley Patton
or hooting like Son House or filling up
a note's semitones with dark molasses
& pebbles like Robert Johnson, barking
like Leadbelly, now content to wail
like the black men he grew up listening
to, their voices invoking something deep
in him from the single lo-fi speaker
of his father's turntable, entering
him like just the Holy Ghost & haunting
him his entire life & isn't it strange
to realize when Dylan sang the way we
most easily remember him he was,
all that time, imitating someone else?