On April 7, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, stroll into the Palais des Congres in Paris. Nobody in the sold-out auditorium, however, pays the first couple much attention. Bob Dylan, who in 1990 was named a Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the highest cultural award France can bestow, is about to take the stage for an evening of nostalgie (as the tickets read). After an old-style vaudevillian introduction, out walks Dylan with his five-member band, sharply dressed in Pretty Boy Floyd suits and fedoras. As Dylan launches into a hard-rock version of Cat's in the Well, from his Under the Red Sky album, the cheering crowd holds up mobile phones, trying to film the enigmatic legend, who immediately ensconces himself behind an electric piano. Dylan plays guitar on only a single song - as is usually the case - but throughout the night his harmonica riffs soar through the cavernous hall.

After about 2 hours, he ends the performance with a defiant version of the crowd-pleasing Blowin' in the Wind. After the show, the Sarkozys wander backstage, anxious to meet Dylan. In a single swooping motion, Sarkozy seizes Dylan's hand, welcoming him to France. "It was like looking at my mirror image," Dylan tells me later about the encounter. "I can see why he's the head of France. He's genuine and warm and extremely likable. I asked Sarkozy, 'Do you think the whole global thing is over?' I knew they had a big G20 meeting and they maybe were discussing that. I didn't think he'd tell me, but I asked anyway."

The audiences at the Palais des Congres were cross-generational: the grey-hairs and the bodypierced youths sat side by side. At this juncture Dylan's audience is... well, everybody. The Armenian-French troubadour Charles Aznavour attended that second Paris show with one of his sons. Dylan, in homage to Aznavour, played the chanteur's melancholic composition The Times We've Known with sublime grace. After the show, the 85-year-old Aznavour joined Dylan backstage for a bit of banter. Wearing a suede coat with a sky-blue scarf around his neck, the deeply tanned Aznavour epitomised to Dylan how a popular musician can comport himself with dignity in the fourth quarter of life. "I finally caught up with you," Dylan tells him. "I saw you in 1963 at Carnegie Hall. It was filled with French people and me. I was the only American there."

After a round of Obama-style fist bumps, Dylan heads down a flight of stairs and onto his touring bus for the five-hour drive to Amsterdam, where he will be playing three more shows. "You're always aware of what town you're in," Dylan says of the millions of miles logged. "But in another sense, touring is like being on a freighter out on the open sea. You're really out there for days and months."

Critics have claimed that since 1988 Dylan has been on a Never Ending Tour, playing more than 100 concerts a year. The aggrieved Dylan bristles at the term.

"Critics should know that there's no such thing as forever," he says. "So that speaks more about them who would use that phrase as if there's some important meaning in it. You never heard about Oral Roberts and Billy Graham being on some Never Ending Preacher Tour. Does anybody ever call Henry Ford a Never Ending Car Builder? Is Rupert Murdoch a Never Ending Media Tycoon? What about Donald Trump? Does anybody say he has a Never Ending Quest to build buildings? Picasso painted well into his nineties. And Paul Newman raced cars in his seventies. Anybody ever say that Duke Ellington was on a Never Ending Bandstand Tour? Critics apply a different standard to me for some reason. But we're living in an age of breaking everything down into simplistic terms, aren't we? These days, people are lucky to have a job. Any job. So critics might be uncomfortable with me [working so much]. Maybe they can't figure it out. But nobody in my particular audience feels that way about what I do. Anybody with a trade can work as long as they want. A welder, a carpenter, an electrician. They don't necessarily need to retire. People who have jobs on an assembly line, or are doing some kind of drudgery work, they might be thinking of retiring every day. Every man should learn a trade. It's different than a job. My music wasn't made to take me from one place to another so I can retire early."

Dylan has spent a lifetime dodging people's attempts to define him. He scorns "newsy people" who constantly try to pin him down about his personal life. Random strangers sometimes come up to him asking for a critique of Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home, a documentary about his life. "I've never seen it," he tells me. "Well, a lot of that footage was gathered up from the ' 60s. So I'd seen that, and I thought that was like looking at a different character. But it certainly was powerful. And I don't, or can't, do that any more."

Dylan's principal frustration, however, is that he feels misunderstood as an artist: "Popular music has no, whatever you call them, critics, that understand popular music in all of its dynamic fundamentalism. The consensus on me is that I'm a songwriter. And that I was influenced by Woody Guthrie and sang protest songs. Then rock'n'roll songs. Then religious songs for a period of time. But it's a stereotype. A media creation. Which is impossible to avoid if you're any type of public figure at all." Where critics think he's deconstructing old songs, he instead sees himself as an old-time musical arranger. "My band plays a different type of music than anybody else plays," Dylan says. "We play distinctive rhythms that no other band can play. There are so many of my songs that have been rearranged at this point that I've lost track of them myself. We do keep the structures intact to some degree. But the dynamics of the song itself might change from one given night to another because the mathematical process we use allows that. As far as I know, no one else out there plays like this. Today, yesterday and probably tomorrow. I don't think you'll hear what I do ever again. It took a while to find this thing. The guy that I always miss, and I think he'd still be around if he stayed with me, actually, was Mike Broomfield," Dylan says of his collaborator on Highway 61 Revisited. "He could just flat-out play. He had so much soul. And he knew all the styles, and could play them so incredibly well.

"But then again, I believe that things are handed to you when you're ready to make use of them. You wouldn't recognise them unless you'd come through certain experiences. I'm a strong believer that each man has a destiny."

Dylan's youthful rebelliousness has matured, now that he's 68, into an old-style American individualism. Casually dressed in jeans and a sleeveless jumper, Dylan offers me coffee for our interview in a second-floor suite at Amsterdam's InterContinental Hotel along the Amstel River. His curly hair is still tousled, his deeply creased face full of mischief. He has a razor-sharp memory. For two evenings, he proves to be a lucid, if circumspect, conversationalist.

Like the dour-faced farmer in Grant Wood's painting American Gothic, Dylan seems to have the American songbook in one hand and a raised pitchfork in the other, aimed at rock critics, politicians, Wall Street financiers, back-alley thieves, the world wide web - anything that cheapens the spirit of the individual. His nostalgia is more for the Chess Records 1950s than the psychedelic 1960s. He believes that Europe should lose the euro and go back to its old currencies - "I miss the pictures on the old money," he says. If Dylan had his way, there'd be Sousa bands on Main Street and vinyl albums instead of CDs. Teenagers would go on nature hikes instead of watching YouTube. "It's peculiar and unnerving in a way to see so many young people walking around with mobile phones and iPods in their ears and so wrapped up in media and video games," he says. "It robs them of their self-identity. It's a shame to see them so tuned out to real life. Of course they are free to do that, as if that's got anything to do with freedom. The cost of liberty is high, and young people should understand that before they start spending their life with all those gadgets."

Ever since 2001' s Love and Theft, Dylan has been producing his own albums under the pseudonym Jack Frost. "It's better that I produce," he says. "It saves a lot of time. A lot of rigmarole. A lot of communication, y'know? It's just easier for me to make records. Translating my own ideas directly rather than having them go through somebody else. I know my form of music better than anyone else would."

Right now, Dylan is focused on Together Through Life, the new studio album he recorded last autumn. The album's genesis was the song Life Is Hard. With a pocket full of lyrics and melodies, Dylan booked a studio to lay down nine other new tracks. To help capture the TexasMexico-escapism aura, Dylan hired the Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter to work with him. The 67-year-old Hunter had previously written two songs with Dylan, for the 1988 album Down in the Groove: Silvio and Ugliest Girl in the World. It's rare, but not unprecedented, for Dylan to collaborate on songs. Over the years, he's shared songwriting credits with the likes of Tom Petty, Willie Nelson, the late Rick Danko of the Band - even Michael Bolton. (When he was in the Traveling Wilburys, Dylan wrote numerous songs with George Harrison. He hopes one day to sit down and work with Paul McCartney: "That'd be exciting, to do something with Paul! But, y'know, your paths have to cross for something like that to make sense.")

On Together Through Life, Dylan's mysticdrifter persona of his recent records has moved from the Mississippi Delta to Houston and the US-Mexico borderland. "You feel things, and you're not quite sure what you feel," Dylan says about the region. "But it follows your every move, and you don't know why. You can't get out of it. It's the pressure that's imposed on us." The album bottles the feeling of King Ranch country along Highway 77. "Spirited guys from down there," Dylan believes. "Independentthinking guys. Texas might have more independent-thinking people than any other state in the country. And it shows in the music. Realistically speaking, that is the same type of music that I heard growing up most nights in Minnesota. The languages were just different. It was sung in Spanish there. But where I came from, it was sung in Polish."

The first track of Together Through Life - Beyond Here Lies Nothin' - is pure Tex-Mex torque. Already getting a lot of radio play in the US, the song conjures up shiny automobiles rumbling across "boulevards of broken cars" through the vast Rio Grande Valley night. By the second track, Life Is Hard, Dylan is wandering past the old schoolyard, looking for strength to fight back the grim tide of old age. A red-brick afterglow lingers in the ballad like in an Edward Hopper painting.

The third track, My Wife's Home Town, a gloss on the old blues standard I Just Want to Make Love to You, echoes the haunting Tom Waits vibe of Mule Variations. The fiendish spectre of suicide is omnipresent: "State gone broke/The county's dry/Don't be lookin' at me with that evil eye." Dylan menacingly cackles "a-hah-heh-heh" on the track. "The song is a tribute, not a death chant," he says. "Deep down, I think that everybody thinks like me sooner or later. They just might not be able to express it."

For guitar, Dylan brought in Mike Campbell (on loan from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers). "Mike and I played before lots of times when I was on tour with Tom," Dylan says. "There was always some part of the show where Mike and myself and [organist] Benmont Tench would play two or three ballads. On my new record I didn't think he'd have any problem."

The sense of dislocation continues in the more upbeat If You Ever Go to Houston. The DylanHunter lyric noticeably references the MexicanAmerican War of 1846 to 1848 as a remembrance of survival against adversity. Something about the Old West mythologies of the gunslinger John Wesley Hardin, the political maverick Sam Houston and the short-story writer O Henry appeals to Dylan's imagination. Like a Western hero, he has given up the sedentary life and chosen the difficult path of his own ideals, made real by noble isolation. "I think you really have to be a Texan to appreciate the vastness of it and the emptiness of it," Dylan says. "But I'm an honorary Texan."

What do you mean? "Well, George Bush, when he was governor, gave me a proclamation that says I'm an honorary Texan [holds hand up in pledge, laughs]. As if anybody needed proof. It's no small thing. I take it as a high honour."

While Dylan has praised Obama and rhapsodised about Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father, he's been uncritical of the Bush administration. Almost every American artist has taken a piñata swipe at Bush's legacy, but Dylan refuses. He instead looks at the Bush years as just another unsurprising incident of dawn-ofman folly. "I read history books just like you do," Dylan says. "None of those guys are immune to the laws of history. They're going to go up or down, and they're going to take their people with them. None of us really knew what was happening in the economy. It changed so quickly into a true nightmare of horror. In another day and age, heads would roll. That's what would happen. The rot would be cut out. As far as blaming everything on the last president, think of it this way: the same folks who had held him in such high regard came to despise him. Isn't it funny that they're the very same people who once loved him? People are fickle. Their loyalty can turn at the drop of a hat."

A cowboy-film aficionado, Dylan considers the director John Ford a great American artist. "I like his old films," Dylan says. "He was a man's man, and he thought that way. He never had his guard down. Put courage and bravery, redemption and a peculiar mix of agony and ecstasy on the screen in a brilliant dramatic manner. His movies were easy to understand. I like that period of time in American films.

I think America has produced the greatest films ever. No other country has ever come close. The great movies that came out of America in the studio system, which a lot of people say is the slavery system, were heroic and visionary, and inspired people in a way that no other country has ever done. If film is the ultimate art form, then you'll need to look no further than those films. Art has the ability to transform people's lives, and they did just that."

The word "caustic" takes on a whole new meaning in Together Through Life's final cut, the sure-to-be-canonical It's All Good. Dylan belittles all those arrogant narcissists who constantly say it's all good, even when the world crumbles around them. I ask Dylan if he has ever uttered the slang expression "It's all good" even once, himself. "I might have, who knows?" he says with a sideways, savvy smile. "Maybe if I was joking or something, just like in the song."

In the pecking order of rock'n'roll survivors, Dylan sees himself as No 2, behind only Chuck Berry. Two songs from the new album - Jolene and Shake Shake Mama - sound like cuts from Berry's After School Session. (Another new Dylan song is Forgetful Heart, which lyrically touches upon Berry's Drifting Heart of that 1957 album.) A friendship has developed between Dylan and Berry over the years. "Chuck said to me, 'By God, I hope you live to be 100, and I hope I live forever,' " Dylan says with a laugh. "He said that to me a couple of years ago. In my universe, Chuck is irreplaceable... All that brilliance is still there, and he's still a force of nature. As long as Chuck Berry's around, everything's as it should be. This is a man who has been through it all. The world treated him so nasty. But in the end, it was the world that got beat."

When I ask Dylan if he'd ever thought of collaborating on a project with Berry, he laughs. "Chuck Berry?" he says. "The thought is preposterous. Chuck doesn't need anybody to do anything with or for him. You got to say that at this point in history he's probably the man. His presence is everywhere, but you never know it. I love Little Richard, but I don't think he performs as much as Chuck. And he's certainly not as spontaneous as Chuck. Chuck can perform at the drop of a hat. Well, Little Richard, he can too, actually, but he doesn't."

After a little more talk on Berry, I shift to Elvis Presley, who inspired Dylan as a young man. Dylan has quipped that when he first heard Elvis's voice as a teenager it was like "busting out of jail". For Dylan, the very fact that Elvis had recorded versions of Don't Think Twice, It's All Right, Tomorrow Is a Long Time, and Blowin' in the Wind remains mind-boggling. Dutifully, as if returning a favour, Dylan recorded Elvis's hit (Now and Then There's) A Fool Such as I during the Basement Tapes and Self Portrait sessions. But that was about as close as they ever got.

"I never met Elvis," Dylan says. "I never met Elvis, because I didn't want to meet Elvis. Elvis was in his ' 60s movie period, and he was just crankin' ' em out and knockin' ' em off, one after another. And Elvis had kind of fallen out of favour in the ' 60s. He didn't really come back until, whatever was it, ' 68? I know the Beatles went to see him, and he just played with their heads. ' Cause George [Harrison] told me about the scene. And Derek [Taylor], one of the guys who used to work for [Harrison]. Elvis was truly some sort of American king. And, well, like I said, I wouldn't quite say he was ridiculed, but close. You see, the music scene had gone past him, and nobody bought his records. Nobody young wanted to listen to him or be like him. Nobody went to see his movies, as far as I know. He just wasn't in anybody's mind. Two or three times we were up in Hollywood, and he had sent some of the Memphis Mafia down to where we were to bring us up to see Elvis. But none of us went. Because it seemed like a sorry thing to do. I don't know if I would have wanted to see Elvis like that. I wanted to see the powerful, mystical Elvis that had crash-landed from a burning star onto American soil. The Elvis that was bursting with life. That's the Elvis that inspired us to all the possibilities of life. And that Elvis was gone, had left the building."

I tell Dylan about a bootleg CD the producer Bob Johnston once sent me of him sounding drunk crooning Yesterday with Johnny Cash. His eyes open wide. "Me and Johnny would sit around hotel rooms in London and sing all kinds of stuff into a tape recorder," he says. "As far as I know those tapes have never surfaced anywhere. But they've been in a few films here and there. I don't really remember Yesterday." When I ask him if he thinks much about Cash, who died in September 2003, he turns sombre.

"Yeah, I do. I do miss him. But I started missing him about 10 years before he actually kicked the bucket."

What does that mean?

"You know, it's hard to talk about. I tell people if they are interested that they should listen to Johnny on his Sun Records and reject all that notorious low-grade stuff he did in his later years. It can't hold a candlelight to the frightening depth of the man that you hear on his early records. That's the only way he should be remembered."

Dylan has become the great American poet of drifting, inheriting a baton that was passed from Walt Whitman to Vachel Lindsay to Carl Sandburg to Allen Ginsberg. It was Sandburg, in fact, who captured Dylan's imagination. The Illinois populist represented the poetic flip side of his endless fascination with Woody Guthrie. Just as Dylan famously sat at Guthrie's sick bed in Greystone Park Hospital in New Jersey, he also spontaneously drove with friends from New York to Hendersonville, North Carolina, simply to bang on the door of his hero. It was in early February, 1964. Mrs Sandburg greeted the stoned-out New Yorkers with Appalachian warmth. "I am a poet," is how Dylan introduced himself. "My name is Robert Dylan, and I would like to see Mr Sandburg." The 86-year-old Sandburg had collected more than 280 ballads in The American Songbag, and Dylan wanted to discuss them. "I had three records out at the time," Dylan says, laughing at his youthful temerity. "The Times They Are A-Changin' was the one I gave him a copy of. Of course he had never heard of me." After just 20 minutes, Sandburg excused himself. Was it worth the drive to North Carolina? "Oh, yeah," Dylan says. "It was worth meeting him. He was the Grand Ol' Man. I always liked his poetry because it was so simple and poignant. You didn't need reference books to read him."

More famously, around this time Dylan forged a bond with Ginsberg, whose poem Howl Dylan had practically memorised line by line. "I like Ginsberg when he invented his own language," Dylan says. "When he put his - nobody I don't think did that before - language down on paper. There's definitely a Ginsbergian language. And I don't think anybody uses it, because nobody has ever caught on to it. But it's powerful, confident language. All that neon jukebox and lonesome farms and grandfather night stuff. The way he puts words together. The ways that, you know, he used the English vocabulary, sharp words that seem to sweat as you read them."

When tabulating literary influences, Dylan summons the name Walt Whitman, for Leaves of Grass continues to inspire him. We talk about Whitman serving as a nurse in a Washington, DC hospital during the civil war, draining gangrene from a wounded soldier's limbs. "I think you can see the change in Whitman," Dylan says. "Before that and after that. He had the most grand view of America. Almost like he's America himself. He's just so big, and he's all that there is.

The Greek Empire. The Roman Empire. The British Empire. All of European history gone. Whitman is the New World. That's what Whitman is all about. But it isn't the New World any more. Poor man. He was hounded and mistreated, too, in his lifetime. And ridiculed. Emerson, Thoreau, all those guys, you don't know what they really thought of him."

If any American personifies life on what Whitman called the "open road", it's Bob Dylan. Woody Guthrie, Blind Willie McTell and Jack Kerouac treasured this rootless way too. "On the Road speeds by like a freight train," Dylan tells me. "It's all movement and words and lusty instincts that come alive like you're riding on a train. Kerouac moves so fast with his words. No ambiguity. It was very emblematic of the time.

You grabbed a hold of the train, hopped on and went along with him, hanging on for dear life. I think that's what affected me more than whatever he was writing about. It was his style of writing that affected us in such a virile way. I tried reading some of his books later, but I never felt that movement again."

Sometimes on the road Dylan stops by the homes or graves of musicians he admires. He once went to Tupelo, Mississippi, to soak in the essence of Elvis. He's made pilgrimages in Texas to search out Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison. I ask him if he minds people visiting Hibbing or Duluth or Minneapolis searching for the root of his talent. "Not at all," he says surprisingly. "That town where I grew up hasn't really changed that much, so whatever was in the air before is probably still there. I go through once in a while coming down from Canada. I'll stop there and wander around."

As for Duluth, where his grandparents lived, he thinks it's one of the country's forgotten gems. "You'll never see another town like Duluth," he says. "It's not a tourist destination, but it probably should be. Depends what season you're in there, though. There are only two seasons: damp and cold. I like the way the hills tumble to the waterfront and the way the wind blows around the grain elevators. The train yards go on forever too. It's old-age industrial, that's what it is. You'll see it from the top of the hill for miles and miles before you get there. You won't believe your eyes. I'll give you a medal if you get out alive."

Dylan then recounts a recent side excursion he made from Minnesota to Manitoba. "I went to see Neil Young's house in Winnipeg," he says. "I just felt compelled. I wanted to see his bedroom. Where he looked out of the windows. Where he dreamt. Where he walked out of the door every day. Wanted to see what's around his neighbourhood in Winnipeg. And I did just that."

How did you do that?

"I don't know. Somebody found out for me where he used to live. I mean, there's no marker or anything. And some people were living in his house. He lived in an upstairs duplex with his mother. I wanted to walk the steps that Neil walked every day."

"Does he know you did that?" I ask.

"I don't think so," Dylan says with a grin.

"I was meaning to send him a card afterward and tell him that. That I'd been there. Where he used to hang out and where he started out. Neil, I respect him so much."

Playing the role of a passing angel, Dylan has sung the songs of Jerry Garcia, Warren Zevron, Frank Sinatra, George Harrison and Waylon Jennings, to name just a few, soon after they died, as a spontaneous tribute to their artistry. Months before Mike Bloomfield died of a drug overdose, Dylan, learning he was struggling, reunited with him in San Francisco to play Like a Rolling Stone one last triumphant time.

Dylan spends most of the afternoon of April 9 at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. I'm not allowed to come along. But later he recaps what crossed his mind, like who his favourite artists are. "Well, of course, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko are good as far as Americans go, and I guess George Bellows and Thomas Hart Benton are okay. But this guy here, from this town, Rembrandt, is one of my two favourite painters. I like his work because it's rough, crude and beautiful. Caravaggio's the other one. I'd probably go 100 miles for a chance to see a Caravaggio painting or a Bernini sculpture. You know who I like a lot is J M W Turner, the English painter. Art is artillery. And those guys, especially Caravaggio and Rembrandt, used it in its most effective manner. After seeing their work, I'm not even so sure how I feel about Picasso, to tell the truth."

Why's that?

"Lots of reasons. He was a renegade painter. He just painted what he wanted. He didn't have anybody over him. I don't think he was ever pushed to the degree that those other guys were. I don't feel Picasso's paintings like I feel the other work I just mentioned. I like Jacques-Louis David a lot, too, although he was a propagandist painter. David's the artist who did the emblematic painting of Napoleon Crossing the St Bernard Pass and The Death of Marat." As for Andy Warhol, Dylan glares at me for bringing his name into the heavyweight mix. "Only as a cultural figure," he says. "Not as an artist."

After that evening's show at the Heineken Music Hall, around 11.30pm, I interview Dylan again. As it's Easter weekend, I push him on the importance of Christian scripture in his life .

"Well, sure," he says, "that and those other first books I read were really biblical stuff. Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur. Those were the books I remembered reading and finding religion in.

Later on, I started reading over and over again Plutarch and his Roman Lives. And the writers Cicero, Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius; I like the morality thing. People talk about it all the time. Some say you can't legislate morality. Well, maybe not. But morality has gotten kind of a bad rap. In Roman thought, morality is broken down into basically four things: wisdom, justice, moderation and courage. These are the elements that would make up the depth of a person's morality. And that would dictate the types of behaviour patterns you'd use to respond in any given situation. I don't look at morality as a religious thing."

But to Dylan, morality is often about holding firm to personal principles. We talk about his refusal to capitulate to CBS censors back in 1963 when he was to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. The network had wanted Dylan to play a Clancy Brothers song, even though he had rehearsed Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues. The censors refused to allow a so-called "commie" protest song into America's cold war living rooms. Dylan wouldn't give in. He now views the walk-off as a seminal event in his early career. "Ed Sullivan was behind me, but the censors came down, and they didn't want me to play that particular song," he says. "I just had it in my mind to do that particular song. I'd rehearsed it, and it went down well. And I knew everybody back home would be watching me on The Ed Sullivan Show. But then I walked off and they couldn't have a chance to see me. I don't know what that says about me as a person. That was the biggest TV show ever at that time, and it was broadcast on Sunday night. Millions of people watched from coast to coast. It was a dream come true just to be on that stage. Everybody knew that."

How did Dylan's mother and father back in Minnesota feel about little Bobby stiffing Mr Sullivan? "Well, we grew up without TV, really," Dylan explains. "TV came in when I was maybe 16. We didn't get the network shows up north. We only got TV from about 3 till 7 when it began to come in. We had no consciousness of TV. None. It was all live entertainment that would come through town. Those days are long gone. Even the memories have been obliterated. I think I was in the last generation that grew up like that. We didn't see Dick Clark. I think Ed Sullivan came in the last year I was at home. Didn't see Elvis on Ed Sullivan because we didn't get that. It was a more innocent way of life. Imagination is what you had and maybe all you had."

When President Sarkozy, looking to make small talk, asked Dylan "Where do you live?" the quick response was a few simple words: "Right here... No. I'm just joking. I'm from the Lone Star State." (Dylan ended by giving Sarkozy a Texasstyle belt buckle as a gift.)

Technically, Dylan's answer wasn't true. Dylan belongs to no city or state. There is Dylan the family man who spends time in California with his children and grandchildren in Malibu, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Sometimes Dylan lingers in the Bay Area for weeks at a time, sketching fishmongers and longshoremen. As a New York Yankees fan, he can be found sitting behind first base in the Bronx on random autumnal nights. But it's Minnesota's north country, which seems to always lie just over the frozen brow of a long-remembered field, where the road still reaches into the void on below-zero blue winter days, that remains Dylan's touchstone place. That's the American landscape that has influenced him most.

"The air is so pure there," he says. "And the brooks and rivers are still running. The forests are thick, and the landscape is brutal. And the sky is still blue up there. It is still pretty untarnished. It's still off the beaten path. But I hardly ever go back.".

© 2009, Rolling Stone. First published in Rolling Stone Magazine.

Distributed by Tribune Media Services

On Neil Young 'I visited his childhood home, just to walk the steps Neil walked every day. I respect him so much'

On Paul McCartney 'I'd like one day to sit down and work with Paul. That'd be an exciting thing to do!'

On Johnny Cash 'I do miss him. But I started missing him about 10 years before he actually kicked the bucket'

On Elvis Presley 'He was truly a sort of American king. But I never met Elvis, because I didn't want to meet Elvis'

On Chuck Berry 'In my universe, Chuck is irreplaceable. As long as he's around, everything's as it should be'

On Allen Ginsberg 'There's a Ginsbergian language. Powerful, confident. Sharp words that seem to sweat'