Category Archives: dylan weekends

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Song of the Day #749: ‘Floater (Too Much to Ask)’ – Bob Dylan

Love and Theft was released on September 11, 2001, and I’ve always considered it a testament to my Dylan fandom that I made it out to Best Buy on that horrible day to buy this album. I suppose in difficult times you cling to what you’re certain of, don’t you?

Like other albums recorded prior to 9/11 but released just afterward (Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot comes to mind), Love and Theft feels eerily appropriate for that time. You won’t find any inadvertently specific echoes of the tragedy (such as the twin buildings on the cover of Wilco’s album) but what you will find is a deeply and meaningfully American album.

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Song of the Day #748: ‘Mississippi’ – Bob Dylan

Twenty-six years and 16 albums after Blood on the Tracks, the fifth of the six albums I consider Bob Dylan’s absolute masterpieces, he released Love and Theft — the sixth. 1997’s Time Out Of Mind was his Grammy-winning comeback album but Love and Theft left it in the dust, proving he was not only back but better than ever.

While Time Out Of Mind is obsessed with mortality, Love and Theft is brimming with life and humor. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard Dylan have as much mischievous fun as he does on this album. Certainly it’s the first Dylan album to feature the phrase “booty call” and the first that I know of to include a knock-knock joke.

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Song of the Day #742: ‘Not Dark Yet’ – Bob Dylan

I’ve always been intrigued by the sequencing of Time Out of Mind. The “money” tracks alternate with the more standard blues fare right down the line.

You start out with ‘Love Sick,’ a slow burner that eases you into the album and invites you to tour the soundscape Dylan and Lanois have served up. Next up is ‘Dirt Road Blues,’ a basic blues track that could have fit on any number of Dylan albums (though the lyrics speak to this record’s themes of loneliness and loss: “I’m gonna have to put up a barrier to keep myself away from everyone.”)

‘Standing in the Doorway’ is a yearning epic and one of the best songs on the album. Check out these opening lines:

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Song of the Day #741: ‘Trying to Get to Heaven’ – Bob Dylan

In 1997, Bob Dylan released his first album of original material since 1990’s Under the Red Sky. That album was a critical disappointment and the two albums of folk covers that followed it did little to change the fact that Dylan hadn’t really lit the world on fire in more than 20 years.

Enter Time Out Of Mind, which kind of did just that.

Yet another “comeback” album for Dylan, the Daniel Lanois-produced Time Out Of Mind earned him his best reviews in decades, went platinum and won the Album of the Year Grammy. At 56, Dylan was suddenly once again at the top of his game.

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Song of the Day #735: ‘Two Soldiers’ – Bob Dylan

World Gone Wrong contains the third song I planned to include in the Dylan-inspired war screenplay I never got around to writing. Good As I Been to You contained ‘Canadee-I-O’ and ‘Arthur McBride,’ about, respectively, a woman who poses as a sailor to make it to the New World and two cousins who get into a violent showdown with a group of military recruiters.

‘Two Soldiers’ would have been the tragedy of the bunch. It details a moment between (you guessed it) two soldiers about to ride into battle. Each promises to do the right thing by the other’s family should he be the sole survivor. Things don’t work out so well.

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