Bob Dylan is heading into the new year with a reduced property portfolio, having sold his Scottish bolthole, Aultmore House in Speyside, for a shade over four million quid.

Though the spec looks grand – 16 bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, a folly (to complement his Christmas album, presumably) – only one aspect interests me: did Dylan ever write anything notable there? Is some piece of the Cairngorms National Park forever preserved in a line – perhaps the one he cribbed from Robbie Burns about his heart being in the Highlands – that came to him while gazing out enigmatically over the croquet lawn?

Where musicians wrote their songs remains a crucially under-discussed element of music criticism

The places where musicians conceive their art in its initial, roughest form hold a strange power and fascination. Yoko Ono recently vacated the apartment in the Dakota building overlooking Central Park which she shared with John Lennon from 1973 until December 1980, when he was shot dead on the street outside it. Given that event, you might think she would have cleared out sooner, but you can understand why she hasn’t. The Dakota walls soaked up Lennon’s music (though not his best music, admittedly). Perhaps the coffee table still carries the faintest impression of the first draft of ‘Beautiful Boy’ as it scratched through the paper. Arty locals on the Upper West Side regarded Ono’s residency in the Dakota in much the same way Londoners view the ravens in the Tower of London. With her departure, at the age of 90, New York has lost some vital connection with its own sense of self.

When I was younger, I used to daydream about what [insert name of current favourite musician] was doing right now. I never pictured them in a recording studio; studios are places of work. Abbey Road aside, which still has a whiff of the magic factory about it, anyone who has ever spent time in studios will have been swiftly disabused of any notions of glamour. And anyway, most modern records aren’t made in recording studios any more. They are made in kitchens, bedrooms and basements. Like much of the rest of the world, workers in song now clock in from home.

I quite like the fact that music-making has become a largely domesticated affair. It completes the circle. In my youth, I never envisioned my favourite pop stars in fancy hotels or executive office suites. I imagined them at home, dirty dishes festering in the sink, carpet left unvacuumed, sitting on a sofa and chewing on a pencil in a fit of muse-struck rapture. If music was my religion, the sticky, neglected homesteads of its high priests and priestesses were my places of (remote) worship. I still often think about the relationship between buildings and rock and roll. I have been known to travel with such things in mind. These pilgrimages are not exotic. No trips to Big Pink, the Band’s famed clubhouse in the hills around Woodstock; nor to the apartment David Bowie shared with Iggy Pop in Berlin in the late 1970s, on Hauptstraße 155 in the Schöneberg district.

I have more mundane residencies logged into my mental satnav. I’ve more than once taken a spontaneous detour off the A702 to check out the whitewashed croft in Roberton where John Martyn once lived; or swung a left just south of Peebles to scope out the row of cottages at Glen Row in Innerleithen that served as home to the Incredible String Band. And never mind the Dakota: the connoisseur’s choice in New York is 105 Bank Street in Greenwich Village, where Lennon and Ono lived in relative normality before moving into grand neo-gothic opulence. Having been to both, the Village house felt more like a place where Lennon could get his hands dirty.

While spending time at these locations, I let fancy get the better of me. This is where the first stirrings occurred, I tell myself. This, perhaps, is where the artist was most truly alive to their art, before the song was shaped and slickened and tamed.

Place, it seems to me, remains a crucially under-discussed element in the otherwise oversubscribed business of music criticism. When interviewing musicians, I like to ask: ‘Where were you when you wrote that song?’ I feel it’s important. Marillion once released an album, Clutching at Straws, on which their singer and lyricist Fish detailed on the inside sleeve the places where the words to each song were written. Most of them were pubs, I seem to recall. This year, we should make this practice law. Let’s celebrate the places where the grunt work was done, ideally with annotated maps – or, better still, geotags.