"Love and Theft," Bob Dylan's latest album, should have been called "43." That's how many albums this makes for America's grittiest troubadour. In a time when pop acts are considered a success if they're on TRL for 43 days, Dylan's achievement is landmark, watershed, relieving and reaffirming. It's more than that: at age 60, Bob Dylan is the single most influential working artist of any media in the past century.
That's a big claim, especially considering that Dylan appears entirely unconcerned with modernity or relevance. "Love and Theft" shuffles through its 12 tracks with the breezy attitude of a 1930s hootenanny. Dylan is a songwriter with nothing left to prove and no more crusades to spearhead. "Say anything you want," he grumbles sagely during "Mississippi," "I've seen it all."
The singing poet invites proximity, physically as well as emotionally. You simply have to listen closely to decipher Dylan's garbled vocalizations. Beyond the gravel pit of Dylan's voice, however, lies the prize. A lyrical gold mine is Dylan's greatest gift to his listeners. "I'm singing love's praises/with sugar-coated rhyme," he claims in "Bye and Bye," but the truth is not so easy. "Love and Theft" mingles small-town heartbreak with a surprisingly panoramic vista of American music from ragtime to rockabilly to the blues, baby.
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"Honeybees are buzzin'/Leaves begin to stir/I'm in love with my second cousin/I'm telling myself I could be happy forever with her," Dylan croons merrily in "Floater (Too Much To Ask)." The album, while recalling scenes of bashful love and carefree youth, still maintains a bittersweet sense of nostalgia. In "Floater," Dylan concludes, "I left all my dreams and hopes/buried under tobacco leaves."
The images of young aspirations in the jazz age meld perfectly with Dylan's composing. Dylan once said that no great song had a middle eight. "Love and Theft" continues his love affair with the bridgeless blues, all walking bass lines, lolling fiddles and mournful lyrics delivered with a wink.
Despite his rejection of contemporary songwriting, Dylan has an unerring ear for a hook. "Po' Boy" and "Moonlight" are unforgettable, even though the chorus sneaks in unannounced, arising seamlessly out of the verse.
The best of "Love and Theft" are those lighthearted numbers that blend the lively six-piece accompaniment with Dylan's tough-as-a-badger persona (See "Floater": "You ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again/You do so at the peril of your own life/I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound").
But Dylan isn't content to make a uniform album. Each song only gives the appearance of being cut from the same cloth. The singer and the speaker are not one and the same. The regretful man who stayed in "Mississippi" one day too long is not the drowning man who is told, "Great as you are, man, you'll never be greater than yourself"in "High Water."
In the end, it's Dylan's supremacy and subtlety as a lyricist that cement "Love and Theft" as a great album. He effortlessly evokes a bygone era as if it were yesterday. When he sings, "From the boat I fish for bullheads/I catch a lot, sometimes, too many," it is as if the yarn-spinning minstrel is telling us of our own childhoods. None of the songs has the same lucid bombast of "Hurricane" or the gentle sorrow of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door," but the collection of "Love and Theft" is its own entity, independent of the music that made Dylan a cultural icon.
"Love and Theft" presents a songwriter who is free of the past even as he glorifies it. As he sings in "Mississippi," "Ah, this emptiness is endless, cold as the clay/You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way."
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