Imagine interviewing a sternly handsome man, whose perfect jawline and chiselled cheekbones seem designed by a Mills & Boon committee, isn’t smiling, happens to be the son of Bob Dylan and is about to release his first solo album. Well, it might be something of an intimidating prospect, had his people not arranged for us to meet in a London hotel room that is painted a shocking shade of purple and lined with endless stag heads.

“No, it’s not how I’d have designed it myself,” Jakob Dylan agrees, the first hint of a smile starting to break through his steely demeanour. “I’d have made it a bit less purple,” he muses, “with fewer antlers . . .”

The 38-year-old father of four turns out to be quite friendly, actually, with a wry sense of humour, even when you ask him the dreaded questions about his dad. He’s just not one for gushing. He grew up in Hollywood, one of five children; his mother being Bob’s first wife Sara, who had been a Playboy bunny. He does of course look like his father, though less gaunt, and the singing voice is unmistakeably close, though without that whining edge that Dylan Sr had at his son’s age. Jakob’s manner seems more self-contained, his body language more compact. You can’t imagine the outbursts of anger and ego seen from Dylan senior on Don’t Look Back, though of course you find yourself searching for father-son similarities.

Jakob married young, had kids young (“it felt easy to take that responsibility, it’s wonderful”), and has been releasing records since his early twenties when his band the Wallflowers took off. But this is the first record he’s released under his own name. With very understated and minimal production from Rick Rubin, it’s just him and a guitar and a bunch of heartfelt songs that must represent, finally, the real Jakob Dylan? Apparently not.

“People presume that a solo record is autobiography – that’s a mistake. Part of the job of songwriters is to put yourself in other people’s shoes. There are people who expect you to have lived it – but I don’t think music’s better because it’s honest.

“There are people who put out a record and say [at this point his voice turns comically deep and intimate]: ‘This is me, this is all me, this record is who I am.’ To me that’s childish. It’s a turn-off. For someone to be ‘honest’ doesn’t make the songs more meaningful to me.”

He talks about the songwriters he loves – Carole King, Randy Newman, Elvis Costello – and how he didn’t need to know their life stories to appreciate their music. So what about, say, Joni Mitchell’s heartbreaking song Little Green, which blows your mind when you discover it’s about a child she put up for adoption? “But how powerful was she that you didn’t have to know? She’s a wordsmith, and the songwriting is on such a high level that you can respond to it anyway,” he explains.

Dylan displays a strange combination of humility and astonishing self-confidence. On the one hand, he says that his life is not all that interesting, that he got chucked out of school for failing because he really struggled with the academic work, that he didn’t get invited to the right parties or even to the right school. Yet when asked about hopes for this album, he’s clearly not interested in playing second fiddle to his dad. “Columbia Records is a very prestigious label and they don’t make records with just anybody, and Rick Rubin doesn’t either. They choose who they work with.” When asked if he’s interested in being a protest singer, he says: “I have greater aspirations than that”.

Blimey, that seems odd, given that he opens his album with a song called Evil is Alive and Well and continues with Everybody Pays as They Go and War is Kind (which continues “. . . of like hell”).

“I just don’t think it’s that easy. I think when music is really stacked with messages, that’s not moving to me, and it doesn’t sound lyrical.” So he wouldn’t have made references to Fox News and the price of oil? “That stuff is not captivating and I’m not into sloganeering.” He says he is a fan of Barack Obama, though. “I’m excited to see what will happen – it can only get better. It’s nice to be coming out the end of that tunnel, and it feels better travelling the world as an American now than it did five years ago. You could feel people looking at you and you just wanted to say: ‘I didn’t have anything to do with it, I didn’t vote for Bush!’ ”

And the inevitable question – has his father heard the record? “You know, I sent it to his office just like everybody else does,” he says slowly, letting it be known that this line of inquiry is testing his patience. “Yeah, of course he’s heard it. And I wouldn’t want to speak for him.” He says he wasn’t nervous as he has always shared his compositions with him, and his dad gives good advice.

As for encouraging his own sons to play, of course he does, but they’re not worried about the career word just yet. It’s a career for Jakob, though (despite suspicions he has access to a Dylan trust fund of millions). “My line of work suits me fine,” he sings on the record – it is, perhaps, the truest line of all.

Seeing Things is released on Columbia Records on Monday

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