Two or three years ago, visiting an area music shop, I looked over a good-sized collection of used CDs. I was scanning the titles, arranged in parallel rows, when my four eyes happened upon a series of Bob Dylan albums, starting with his earliest and concluding with his latest, in neat chronological order. In my many prior expeditions to the place, I'd seen no more than the occasional stray Dylan product; such an embarrassment of discards wasn't likely to have occurred at random, I was sure.

I asked the manager of the establishment, a friend, how all those Dylans came to be there. According to her, a lifelong fan of her acquaintance had awakened one morning, decided he was through with Dylan, then drove to town to trade in what had been among his most treasured possessions until that day or thereabouts. My first instinct was to pick up a relatively obscure CD missing from my own collection. I took it home, played it once, and promptly forgot about it. Though for an assortment of reasons I will never transform my Dylan collection into used CDs for others to claim on the cheap, I have come to the point at which I could understand why, though a stranger to me, the guy did just that.

After decades of fandom, many of them intense fandom (see my review of Tempest in this space on 6 October 2012), the faith is fading, the enthusiasm slowing to a near-stop. Until a few years ago, when he decided he was Frank Sinatra, I purchased every Dylan album (both the new ones and the so-called official bootlegs) immediately upon their release. I read as many books about Dylan as I could get my hands on. (They still occupy multiple shelves in my personal library.) I read the first, a mass-market quickie paperback by Sy & Barbara Ribakove, Folk-Rock: The Bob Dylan Story (1966); Elijah Wald's far more substantive Dylan Goes Electric! (2015), I swear, will be my last. When I listened to his latest release of new material, Rough & Rowdy Ways -- once -- I deemed it mildly interesting that he'd borrowed the title of one of Jimmie Rodgers's less dopey songs; less interestingly, from the bombastic epic "Murder Most Foul," that he is a devotee of long-discredited but depressingly persistent conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination.

Dylan has exhausted me. It's the relentless hype that surrounds everything he does. It's the many tales of social cruelty bordering on sadism, the growing corporatization of the Dylan enterprise, the never-ending touring beyond any justification except the continuous collection of money from the relentlessly gullible, the indifferently executed concerts, the cynical packaging of largely (in fairness, not exclusively) lackluster alternate takes and tossed-off material. These days Dylan's voice comes through my speakers only if it's on anthology with other folk-influenced artists. (And I must acknowledge here that Dylan introduced me to the traditional music that has lightened my life ever since.)

If my rant resonates, you might want to consider Bob's Back Pages. True, its title references a particularly ham-fisted (but nonetheless championed and covered) composition, "My Back Pages," but rest assured, that one is not here. Instead, it's 10 of Dylan's strongest (plus, as the closer, the regrettable "Make You Feel My Love," about which we say no more save that Williams does as well as she can with it).

It helps that Back Pages opens with the masterly "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," a song that except for the electric arrangement on Bringing It All Back Home (1965) could have fit easily on Dylan's first two acoustic folk-and-blues albums.There are some fine versions of that song around, but I feel safe in declaring Williams's the equal of any. It's also rather more muscular than Dylan's morose reading.

One of the pleasant surprises is "Queen Jane Approximately," from Highway 61 Revisited (also I hadn't heard it in ages and hadn't thought of it for nearly as long). Williams' interpretation has a genuine urgency to it, whereas Dylan's (at least as I remember it) just felt like bitching about yet another woman who had gotten on his nerves, which never has taken much. It's what he writes about when he has nothing else to say, as if in endless recycling of the sentiments of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right."

Williams dazzlingly reworks late-Dylan masterpieces such as "Not Dark Yet," "Blind Willie McTell" and "Tryin' to Get to Heaven." I concede that his versions are pretty damn good, but Williams uncovers secrets heretofore hidden, presumably because both her voice and her intelligence allow her to do so. There is no song here I am unfamiliar with, but Williams seems to rediscover each, and even the most knowledgeable (or cynical) Dylanists will experience them anew. Also, on a couple of occasions ("Queen Jane" being the other), the songs needed a voice like Williams'. Hearing it on "Political World," I appreciated what a fine song it is, not apparent from Dylan's vapid recording. I give Williams credit for daring to take on "Idiot Wind," which is not quite so mood-altering as Dylan's but still a stiff drink.

Bob's Back Pages led me to an essential truth about my Dylan Problem. It's the Dylan myth I'm sick of. In common, I'm sure, with many others who have immersed themselves in it, even the greatest of his songs tend to vanish into a sinkhole of distractions. I stopped listening to Dylan because I was hearing him and all he had come to represent, which somehow had no longer to do with extraordinary songcraft. In addition, few who have paid tribute to him have done it as exquisitely as Lucinda Williams, always remaining attached to her blistering rock/blues/folk basics and her keen sensitivity to a song's reason for existence, does here.

A word in closing: Bob's Back Pages is the third in a series of cover projects she is releasing. The others include tributes to 1960s soul, Tom Petty, '60s country and, coming next January, the Rolling Stones. Each is enjoyable, but this one is exhilarating.