Tag Archives: Bob Dylan

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Song of the Day #762: ‘This Dream Of You’ – Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan’s 33rd studio album, and currently his most recent collection of original songs, was 2009’s Together Through Life. After the five year span between Love and Theft and Modern Times, a wait of less than three years for this CD was welcome. And the album came as a surprise, announced in the media just a month or two before its release.

Together Through Life can be viewed as the completion of a trilogy that began with Love and Theft, as the three albums share a producer (Dylan himself, under his Jack Frost pseudonym) and a general vibe and attitude. Time Out Of Mind, his other brilliant release of the past dozen years, stands apart from these three though it marked his creative resurgence.

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Song of the Day #756: ‘Nettie Moore’ – Bob Dylan

The New York Times stirred up a bit of controversy when they reported that a number of lyrics on Modern Times had apparently been lifted by Bob Dylan from Civil War era poet Henry Timrod. This followed the borrowing of several lines on Love and Theft from an obscure novel by Japanese writer Junichi Saga.

Serious fans of Bob Dylan, and of folk and blues music in general, consider this much ado about nothing. This sort of music is passed down through generations like an oral tradition, with each new artist building on what he borrows wholesale from those who’ve inspired him. Dylan has done that from day one, twisting together new songs from the melodies and text of time-worn classics.

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Song of the Day #755: ‘Thunder On the Mountain’ – Bob Dylan

In 2006, Bob Dylan completed the trifecta he began nine years earlier, releasing Modern Times as the follow-up to Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft.

This trio of albums rivals Dylan’s other stellar triple shots: Bring It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde in the 60s; and Blood On the Tracks, The Basement Tapes and Desire in the 70s.

I’ve said it many times before in many different ways… most recording artists would sell their mothers for one string of albums as great as any of those. That Dylan has done it three times, among 25 other albums of varying degrees of greatness, is simply astounding.

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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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