Fan Fare

The next time you see Jakob Dylan pouring his heart and soul into his songs while performing in concert, be aware that the rock musician could be faking it and pondering some completely random notion.

“I can sing just about anything, and think about almost anything else. I really can. You’d be surprised,” Dylan told fans during a Q&A at the Grammy Museum on Monday, a day before the release of his second solo album. ”I’m not above playing songs that people want to hear whether I’m necessarily so into it. I won’t make an audience wait 4 hours ’til I get to that (mental) spot.

“The only time I try to avoid songs is when I think that it just sounds like, ‘Oh boy, for those 4 minutes I’m probably going to check out too much and that’s not good for anybody.’” 

The 40-year-old rock ‘n’ roll scion begins a U.S. tour near Pittsburgh on Friday to promote the new disc “Women + Country.” As the married father of  four children, he said he has become increasingly aware that concertgoers are shelling out good money for babysitters and gas, “and I think you’ve got to honor that to some degree.”

Dylan, the youngest son of Bob Dylan, rose to fame in the 1990s at the helm of the Grammy-winning band Wallflowers. Their second album, 1996′s “Bringing Down the Horse,” yielded such hits as “One Headlight” and “6th Avenue Heartache.” Both that album and “Women + Country” were produced by T-Bone Burnett, who won an Oscar this year for co-writing a song from “Crazy Heart.” He also won the album of the year Grammy last year for producing the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss hit “Raising Sand.”

Dylan said he first met Burnett on his father’s Rolling Thunder Revue concert tour in 1975-76. “We swap stories, but we saw different things,” he joked.

The Q&A inevitably touched on  his famous dad, with Dylan being his usual guarded self. Coincidentally, and unremarked upon, “Women + Country” was recorded last summer at The Village Recorder, the West Los Angeles studio where Bob Dylan recorded the tracks for his 1974 album “Planet Waves,” including the ode to his children “Forever Young.”