Bob Dylan has always created his songs from some timeless mist — with some of his most ground-breaking lyrics tacked onto ancient folk tunes, creating a mysterious convergence between the old and the new, the traditional and the revolutionary.

Maybe that’s why many of the tracks on his most recent release “Tell Tale Signs The Bootleg Series Vol. 8” sound as if he might have strolled into the studio and recorded them last week — or maybe 20 years ago.

Some songs on “Tell Tale Signs” do date back to 1989 and some were recorded as recently as 2006, but this is far from an album of throwaways.

Dylan, the first artist to have his unreleased recordings extensively bootlegged, or released in unauthorized versions by individuals who somehow got possession of them, finally decided to “bootleg” his own albums. He started with “The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3” back in 1991.

Since then admirers of Dylan’s music have been eagerly awaiting each new release after discovering one of Dylan’s eccentricities. He usually recorded more tracks than needed for an album — nothing unusual about that — but he would often pull some of his best songs from the official release.

The first of the Bootleg Series included “Blind Willie McTell,” one of the best songs Dylan’s ever written, inexplicably left off his 1983 album “Infidels.”

Dylan’s 1997 album “Time Out of Mind” garnered nearly universal praise as a dramatic comeback and won him a handful of Grammys, including Album of the Year.

Even so, some of those in the studio for the recording of “Time Out of Mind,” including engineer Jim Dickinson, said Dylan left some of his best tracks of the award-winning album — a statement hard to believe after hearing Dylan’s late-period masterpiece.

Now, the release of “Tell Tale Signs” prove Dickinson right. It contained such previously hidden gems as “Girl From the Red River Shore,” one of the most poignant songs Dylan has written,

In a world-weary voice, Dylan sings “Some of us turn off the lights and we live in the moonlight shooting by. Some of us scare ourselves to death in the dark to be where the angels fly.”

Later in the song Dylan sings “Well, I’ve been to the east and I’ve been to the west and I’ve been out where the black winds roar.” Throughout the song, his voice is imbued with the regretful knowledge that no one has ever seared his soul like the girl from the Red River shore.

Dylan offers two versions of the album’s gritty opening track, “Mississippi,” originally on “Love and Theft.” I prefer the opening version, which sounds like Dylan and a buddy are leaning back in their chairs under the Delta moonlight, picking and singing in a laid-back jam session.

The album is filled with other discoveries. At last, there’s a studio recording of “Born in Time” that does justice to a transcendent version of the song I once heard Dylan perform during a concert in Oklahoma City.

On the second disc, Dylan plays and sings several traditional songs including “Cocaine Blues,” the old blues standard that’s been performed by the Rev. Gary Davis. In the song, Dylan sings as if in the throes of hell as he nearly gasps “Hey baby, better come her quick, this old cocaine about to make me sick, cocaine all around my brain.” It’s one of his most riveting performances as Dylan conjures images of how the addictive drug can ravage not only the body, but the spirit as well.

The album also includes several recordings from movie soundtracks including “Across the Green Mountain,” a song Dylan wrote for the movie “Gods and Generals.” In a touching performance, he captures the pathos of the bloody Civil War which ripped the nation asunder: “A letter to mother came today, gunshot wound to the breast is what it did say. But he’ll be better soon, he’s in a hospital bed.” In an emphatic voice, Dylan delivers the kicker: “But he’ll never be better, he’s already dead.”

On “Mississippi,” Dylan sings “I got here following the southern star; I crossed that river, just to be where you are.”

More than any other major recording artist, Dylan has always followed his own star.

Heckled for switching from folk to electric rock music, puzzling the hipsters by singing gentle country songs near the end of the turbulent ’60s, confounding many in the mainstream by his hard-core Christian music of the late ’70s and early ’80s, recording new albums of traditional folk and blues standards in the 1990s and winning acclaim for his thunderous late period resurgence that stands with the best work of his brilliant career, Dylan has remained an enigma.

Who knows why he decided to release these songs now? For whatever reason, “Tell Tale Signs” is not only a major addition to the Dylan canon — it’s also a sign there are likely more musical treasures hidden away in his vaults.

Let’s hope the stars soon align and the tumblers start clicking. “The Bootleg Series Vol. 8” shows Dylan indeed has many more tales to tell.

Contact James Beaty at jbeaty@mcalesternews.com.