Love And Theft - Bob Dylan (2001)
The “never-ending tour” had let Dylan experiment with nearly anything he wanted from one night to the next. By the end of 1999, the road band featured guitar whiz Charlie Sexton, with Larry Campbell adding a third guitar as well as mandolin, violin, and pedal steel. It was the most wide-open and fully formed band he’d had since the start of the marathon in the late 80s. This was a band custom-built for big, sprawling electric blues numbers as well as lively western swing and roadhouse country rock.
1997’s Time Out Of Mind had featured members of his road band as well, but they’d been augmented by producer Daniel Lanois and a lot his hand-picked studio hands. In what had been typical of Dylan albums, 13 different players have “additional musicians” credits on that record.
Things were about to change in a large and bombastic way. In May of 2001 Dylan landed his band by themselves in a Manhattan studio, rolled tape, and produced and directed the sessions that would become Love And Theft.
It might have been a voice note in Dylan’s head, putting down in writin what was on his mind, as it were. He’d spent the last few years on the road exploring how older traditions of vocal jazz, swing, and country and western intersected with the modern rock world. He’d penned a bunch of songs that gave plenty of homage to those older tunes, but with his own “invasive thoughts” style lyrics that told wild stories, made dirty jokes, expanded his vision of love as a dark and doomed karmic obligation, and poked fun at his own legend.
The result is a firecracker of a record. It’s a uniformly excellent batch of songs, given to being long-winded and meandering but always in the best possible sense.
While thematically similar, mixing the old America with Dylan’s apocalyptic vision of modern times, the music is diverse. It veers from swaggering blues to contemporary “baseball cap country” to pre-war jazz ballads.
There are highlights, particularly the gloomy blues of High Water (for Charley Patton), rockabilly stomp of Summer Days, and the gorgeous ballad Moonlight that would end up being a pointer to the next phase of the Dylan myth.
