ON a perfect, sunny afternoon, Jakob Dylan sat not quite comfortably in the small recording studio he maintains on the grounds of his Los Angeles home. A single candle burned in the room, which was crowded with instruments and gear. The blue eyes that helped make him a '90s-era heartthrob shone, and his black hair, pushed back off his face, jutted this way and that in hip disarray. The Wallflowers, the band Mr. Dylan has led for 15 years, have a new album coming out, and that can mean only one thing: more questions about his dad.

"You got right to the head of why people have a problem with me," he said patiently in response to just such a question. "If people want to talk about Bob Dylan, I can talk about that. But my dad belongs to me and four other people exclusively. I'm very protective of that. And telling people whether he was affectionate is telling people a lot. It has so little to do with me. I come up against a wall."

That wall is something Mr. Dylan, who is 35, has negotiated his entire life. Those "four other people" are his brothers and sisters, of whom he is the youngest. His parents have been divorced for almost 30 years, and Mr. Dylan was raised by his mother, Sara Lowndes, in California. His father, meanwhile, has confounded fans interested in his personal life for more than four decades. Now 63, the elder Dylan remains hidden in plain sight, a complete mystery despite a current best-selling memoir, a recent movie, a documentary with Martin Scorsese in the works, more than a hundred concerts a year, the steady release of new and archival music, and a mountain of books, articles and exhibitions about him.

In interviews Mr. Dylan has rarely discussed his father, or even used the words "my dad," so determined has he been to guard his father's privacy. He also once believed, however naïvely, that his own considerable accomplishments - for example, the Wallflowers selling four million copies of their 1996 album, "Bringing Down the Horse," and winning two Grammys in the process - might make people less curious about his lineage. He has now accepted that that will very likely never happen. "I still go into a restaurant and people say, 'I love your dad's work,' " he said, wearily. So he might as well address the questions honestly, he has now decided.

In his studio that afternoon, he had the look of a man who is standing on a diving board, wondering whether to jump. Then he jumped. "Yes," he said, taking a breath, "he was affectionate. When I was a kid, he was a god to me for all the right reasons. Other people have put that tag on him in some otherworldly sense. I say it as any kid who admired his dad and had a great relationship with him. He never missed a single Little League game I had. He's collected every home run ball I ever hit. And he's still affectionate to me." He paused and smiled. "Maybe he doesn't want people to know that," he said. "But I'll tell you, because it's my interview."

Mr. Dylan's refusal to speak about his father has sometimes been interpreted as a sign of tension between them, which is another reason he has broken his silence. However complicated it has been to be Bob Dylan's son, Mr. Dylan loves and admires both the man and his music. Andrew Slater, the president of Capitol Records and formerly the Wallflowers' manager, was initially surprised that Mr. Dylan would listen to his father's songs as the band traveled in its van. "I finally found the right moment to ask him," Mr. Slater said. "I said, 'Jakob, what goes through your mind when you listen to your father's records?' He said, 'When I'm listening to 'Subterranean Homesick Blues,' I'm grooving along just like you. But when I'm listening to 'Blood on the Tracks,' that's about my parents.' I never asked him again."

Mr. Dylan takes a kind of perverse satisfaction in realizing that he is hardly the only songwriter who is awed by the long shadow that his father's genius has cast. "Look, he's the best at what I do," he said matter of factly. "I know that, and so do my heroes. I got to watch my heroes meet him and saw how they reacted, whether it was Joe Strummer or Tom Waits. It was peculiar. I'm so stoked to meet Tom Waits, and he's so nervous to meet my dad. It's a head spin."

"Rebel, Sweetheart," the Wallflowers' fifth album, is set for release on May 24 - Bob Dylan's 64th birthday, as it happens. As usual, the younger Dylan, who sings and plays guitar, wrote all 12 songs on the album, which was produced by Brendan O'Brien, who has also worked with Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam. Mr. O'Brien has focused and toughened the Wallflowers' elemental, roots-rock sound, while preserving the melodic flair of Mr. Dylan's songs. The single, "The Beautiful Side of Somewhere," gracefully rises into a memorable chorus, while the ballad "How Far You've Come" offers sweet encouragement. "You're not the only one/Who's failed to hang on to a moving star," Mr. Dylan sings.

Those words are meant to buck up the singer himself. Since the blockbuster sales of "Bringing Down the Horse," he has had to compete not only with his father's peerless achievements, but also with the standard of his own commercial success. Two subsequent albums, "(Breach)" and "Red Letter Days" have not sold nearly as well.

Mr. Dylan, who is married and has three young boys of his own, credits his father with helping him maintain perspective on his professional ups and downs. "To us, there was Bob Dylan and there was dad," he explained. "As for what he meant to other people, that was never glorified in our house. There were no accolades there, no gold records. You wouldn't know if he had a good year or not. That's the way I try to conduct myself."

The family clearly became a sanctum against the insanity that has been an unfortunate byproduct of the Dylan mystique - another reason for son's reluctance to discuss his father's personal life. "He's acquired some strange fans over the years," Mr. Dylan said wryly.

"The second you walked out the door, it was everywhere," he said. "Do most kids have people crash their bar mitzvah?" He mentions A. J. Weberman, the infamous "garbologist," who pored over the Dylan family's trash in an effort to glean insight into Bob's songs. "Those were my diapers," Mr. Dylan said, still incredulous.

The sense of vulnerability was frightening. "When I was a kid, 13 or 14, we'd visit New York, and we'd eat at a friend's house in the Village," Mr. Dylan recalled. "Our hotel would be by Central Park, and we'd walk straight up there after dinner. I would be terrified the entire time that someone would hurt him. I was little, and I felt like, 'I can't help you if somebody comes up to you.' I always felt safer when we were in some secluded situation."

The two men remain close, and see each other every week when they're not traveling. So don't hold your breath for a scandalous Dylan family reality show. "My father said it himself in an interview many years ago: 'Husband and wife failed, but mother and father didn't,' " Mr. Dylan said. "People watch those shows and want to see you live a terrible life and embarrass yourself. But I've got a life that really matters to me, and that's because of the way I was raised. My ethics are high because my parents did a great job."