Think about the changes in Bob Dylan’s career and how often they’re associated with lineup changes. Most famously, he made news when he added Mike Bloomfield and his band to “go electric,” followed closely by performing the British tour in 1966 with the Band, but Blood on the Tracks changed when Dylan scrapped the acoustic sessions he’d done in NYC to recut the songs in Minnesota with new players and electric instruments, and other bands took his music through less cataclysmic changes.

Tell Tale Signs suggests that each new musical configuration of a song is its own journey and destination, not an attempt to get to some ideal version. The album collects rare and unreleased tracks recorded since 1989’s Oh Mercy (cut here in New Orleans with Daniel Lanois producing), and the versions are neither better nor worse than the ones that saw the light of day, though because Tell Tale Signs coheres so well, it’s easy to prefer these right now. “Mississippi” appeared on Love and Theft, and the sweet, wistful version of it here with just Dylan and Lanois moves more discursively from that version and the one that opens disc two. He’s thinking out loud when accompanied just by Lanois. When the Time Out of Mind band plays it, “Mississippi” gets a formal presentation that makes it sound like a century-old song rediscovered.

The songs speak differently in different settings, and Dylan adapts his voice to the context. In the attractive “Most of the Time,” he rolls back 30 years of croakery, but his live version of “Cocaine Blues” is him at craggy finest. Those voices suit the songs and his subject matter of the last 15 years—how do we get through these lonely, desolate days? And the presentation of songs out of time adds to the sense that everything here could have come from last month or the last century, and getting through this world with your fingers and toes intact has always been a problem.