"Love and Theft"

"I blew out some candles, ate some cake, and went to bed," he told the Times.

He managed a little more too, spending a couple of weeks in a New York studio in mid-May, on a break from his ongoing touring.

With Dylan at the production desk the album was quickly recorded and mixed.

Dylan and his band were joined by keyboardist Augie Meyers, who reported that the sessions were workmanlike, thoroughly enjoyable, with Dylan penning extra verses between takes as needed.

The result, "Love And Theft", Dylan's 39th studio album, positively hums with brilliance.

Though it sounds little like the Grammy-winning "Time Out Of Mind", the new album fits right in with Bob's musical journey through the past decade or so.

In 1991 he released a collection of old folk and blues songs on "Good As I Been To You". A year later the more focused collection, "World Gone Wrong", popped out.

Dylan was delving deep back into his musical roots, shaking the dust off his battered copy of the "Anthology of American Folk Music" and clearing the dust from his own head. "Time Out Of Mind" came along in 1997, loaded with musical and lyrical references to myriad blues, folk and country songs. Old timey and bang up to date, the album was a huge success.

Four years on comes the next instalment and it is every bit as good.

A condensed, densely packed, pocket-sized version of Bob Dylan's America, "Love And Theft" sounds like nothing else you'll hear all year

From barroom blues to gentle swing, the 12 songs here cover a huge geographical territory: from the Deep South to Appalachia, from Florida to the Iron Range. The America that emerges is a feral country, barely a step away from the wild.

Full of hope, large skies and boundless possibility, this America is also ruthless, brutal and casually cruel. Dylan sings of honeybees buzzing and flowers blooming in the gently swaying Floater. A few verses later he's warning that he's not to be messed with.

Dylan narrates his way around this landscape, observing odd characters and weird locations, from the troublesome Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, who initially sound like a pair of loose-limbed eejits but who by song's end you'd not want to meet even on a well lit street, to the Po' Boy who can't put a foot right.

Romeo and Juliet drift by, as do Othello and Desdemona, immigrants to this restless nation; Darwin crops up, stranded out on Highway 5, his future looking dodo-bright; and seemingly plain folks all would fillet and skillet the unwary in a trice. Dylan shrugs his shoulders, makes a note in his book, and remarks about the changing weather and changing locations.

It is a rich confection indeed.

But all this musical arcana would mean little if the thing didn't sound so damned good.

Dylan and his band are in perfect synch, honed into a versatile and duck's arse tight unit by the endless touring.

Whether cutting loose on "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" or on "Honest With Me" (which crackles and zips like an updated "Highway 61") or taking it gentle on "Po' Boy" and "High Water" Dylan and his band are a perfect musical unit. Effortlessly, they take on and a variety of styles and sounds, cutting a swathe across musical America. If it all goes pear shaped they'd make a hell of a decent living on the wedding and 21st circuit.

Jorge Luis Borges said that with the best poetry there is a thrill, an almost physical emotion, which comes with each reading. The lyrics, Dylan's singing, and phrasing, and that razor sharp sound, together make "Love And Theft" a truly thrilling thing. Poetry it may not be; a stirring, striking, and hugely enjoyable collection it certainly is.

Dylan effortlessly recovers the past with these songs. I imagine that this is the musical landscape that the teenage Dylan dreamt up living through those long cold Iron Range winters, his radio tuned to stations from Memphis and New Orleans broadcasting weird and wonderful tunes.

Dylan told USA Today "I think of it more as a greatest-hits album, volume one or volume two. Without the hits - not yet, anyway." And you know, he wasn't far wrong.

"Love And Theft" is a gem.

Dylan's miracle working knows no stopping, and with this release, he single-handedly creates an homage to the blues and yet captures all the tensions therein this particular genre. It's truly a greatest hits album, but not of Dylan, but rather the blues. That is the central paradox of this album. He has created a blues album which is simultaneously being torn in two directions, which epitomises the genre itself in the 1930s to the 1950s.

LOVE AND THEFT certainly marks its roots in the blues. Just a little over half the album plays like the successor that this record is to the 1997's smash TIME OUT OF MIND in the sense that it feels really bluesy but without the death obsession that its predecessor had. The other half, (these five tracks: Summer Day, Bye and Bye, Floater, Moonlight, and Po' Boy) sound like they call come from the same synapses of Dylan's brain, as their sound blur into one another. The best way to describe it is it sounds like old, simple bluesy folk compositions with a real 1930s to 1940s feel too it. Summer Day's intro reminds me of old 1950s rock, but then transform back into the similar feel of the aforementioned tracks. On first listening thru these songs, I found myself wanting to skip them, but on second listen I became more impressed with the compositions. It's as if Dylan wanted to make old scratchy records without the scratches from the Depression Era, and generally he is successful. Although I never thought I would make this analogy, the track "Moonlight" reminds me of old Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra.

Because this is the release immediately after TIME OUT OF MIND, an album that won Dylan critical praise and renewed interest, I feel I need to clarify LOVE AND THEFT's relationship to TIME OUT OF MIND. TIME OUT OF MIND, which plays like a concept album about death and being in love with a woman he wishes he wasn't, feels like BLOOD ON THE TRACKS aged twenty or so years, and an utter weariness permeates the proceedings. (Taken in this context, "To Make You Feel My Love" stands as one of the most depressing and pained things Dylan ever wrote).

And just like BLOOD ON THE TRACKS and DESIRE, TIME OUT OF MIND and LOVE AND THEFT are two completely different albums. BLOOD and TOOM are very personal albums. DESIRE has a weird world beat, and LOVE AND THEFT, although much closer to TOOM in its musical foundation (for both share blues as their central structure), loses the intimacy of TOOM, which creates yet another paradox, because TOOM has all the intimate factors that make Blues feel so personal to us, and yet LOVE AND THEFT loses that feeling of raw intimacy and yet it better captures the blues genre that TOOM does. TOOM is personal application of Blues principles, where LOVE AND THEFT is more of a textbook study of the tensions of the blues genre.

LOVE AND THEFT keeps the same blues base, but ultimately TIME OUT OF MIND is ultimately the bluesier in the modern context of the two records because there is more of a cohesian of the pain and more commonly perceived blues elements. Each song adds the pain felt in the previous song, making it like a snowball effect and culminating in the 16 minute closer "Highlands". Ironically, though, this record captures more of the blues tradition and the genre's myriad influences, although time may have obscured this. This tension between those old scratchy folk sounding songs and the more commonly perceived bluesy material creates a tension that is not felt on TIME OUT OF MIND at all. Side 1 (the first six songs), opens with two blues, then two of the other, then another one that's like TOOM, and then ends with "Floater". Side 2 is a similar story. Dylan's sequencing proves absolutely essential on this release, for without it the tension would simply be lost. A very notable composition is "Highwater (for Charlie Patton)*," which sounds like a close relative of "Ballad of Hollis Brown," and straddles the fence quite appropriately between the blues and folk but with more emphasis on folk. Because folk's influence on blues is never made more explicit in the context of this record than on here, "Highwater" stands as a very important link to the song cycle that is LOVE AND THEFT.

Dylan said of LOVE AND THEFT that the songs don't really have any genetic history, and that they're probably not like his previous works. Dylan said he thought of it more like a greatest hits album, either Volume I or II. There weren't any hits on this record -- at least, not YET.

Again, Dylan proves the most perceptive of his work. Although LOVE AND THEFT's closest relation in Dylan's catalogue is TIME OUT OF MIND, it stands as a greatest hits record of blues' history and the struggle with in the genre to find its own sound, and yet these are all new songs created by Dylan in the new millennium. That is the central paradox of LOVE AND THEFT, and what makes it so incredibly interesting.

*If you have any information on him please email me.