Bob Dylan – ‘Love and Theft’
Bob Dylan had done it all: gone electric, returned to folk, joined supergroups, snubbed famous fans, toured with the Grateful Dead, been denied entry into the Grateful Dead, entered an artistic fallow period, and returned to critical acclaim. By the turn of the 21st century, Dylan’s Bootleg Series was in full bloom and his Never Ending Tour had yet to end. He kicked off the new millennium by snagging a ‘Best Original Song’ Oscar for ‘Things Have Changed’, his contribution to the 2000 film Wonder Boys.
With all of those boxes checked, there wasn’t much else to do but make another studio album. Coming off the heels of his Daniel Lanois-produced comeback LP Time Out of Mind, Dylan’s confidence in his songwriting ability was restored. By pairing up his signature verbose and heavily referential lyric writing with a Southern gothic atmosphere that recalled centuries-old roots music, the material on Dylan’s 14th studio album Love and Theft is a natural extension of the singer’s revamped identity.
That’s all present on the album’s opening track, ‘Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum’. Featuring a rollicking rockabilly beat and no less than 12 different verses, the song tumbles its way toward something less serious and more lighthearted than Dylan’s typical output. But don’t let the song’s goofiness fool you: images of dead man’s bones and brains being fried in garlic and olive oil add a particularly fatalistic wrinkle to Dylan’s croak.
Love and Theft is home to another one of Dylan’s new traits: his growling vocal delivery. After 40 years of whining, chanting, bellowing, and beckoning, Dylan’s voice hadn’t smoothed out so much as it had been ground up. The creaks and cracks in his voice are especially evident on slower songs like ‘Mississippi’ and ‘Sugar Baby’ where his attempts to croon occasionally go horribly wrong. Then again, tracks like ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Po’ Boy’ find Dylan excelling at finding the right notes and tones to add timelessness with his weathered voice.
If there’s one thing that Love and Theft continues from Dylan’s previous incarnations, it’s his unwillingness to lift the curtain and expose the man pulling the ropes. The characters that file out the album might be fragments of Dylan’s own identity, but most times, they’re just fictions that Dylan can bounce off of.
A rare case of Dylan choosing some real-life inspiration comes in the form of ‘High Water (For Charley Patton)’, dedicated to the legendary Mississippi blues guitarist but also roping in historical names like Big Joe Turner, George Lewis and Charles Darwin along with fictional figures like Bertha Mason. Taking on a distinctive bluegrass flavour, ‘High Water’ is an impressionistic take on dust bowl escapism and off-kilter poetic romanticism.
Whatever musical style he’s choosing, Dylan makes sure to stay as far away from modernity as humanly possible. ‘Summer Days’ features the distinctive swing of early 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, the same kind that Dylan played when he was still Robert Zimmerman. ‘Bye and Bye’ is lounge jazz played completely straight. All the while, Dylan’s band is tight and versatile, able to conjure up the sounds of the past without tipping over into full-on pastiche.
While the rest of the world was preparing to enter the future that Y2K promised, Bob Dylan was going in exactly the opposite direction. Channelling the sights, sounds, and scenes of America that were well beyond passé, Dylan breathes new life into old-timey themes and continues to reinvent his own artistic voice. Love and Theft might live up to both of its titular promises, but the final product is unmistakably Dylan.
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