I toyed with some other titles, but I was never in any real danger of not listing Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft as my #1 album of 2001.
This was the Bard’s 29th studio album, in his fifth decade of recording, and it’s as vital and playful as anything he put out in the 60s. He released his meditation on death and aging, Time Out of Mind, a couple of years earlier, and people might have easily mistaken it for a swan song. Instead, Love and Theft suggested it was a rebirth.
I have never and will never tire of Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft. This is one of the very best albums by one of the very best singer-songwriters in popular music history.
While the album features a few structurally complex songs, as well as a couple of delicate melodies tailor made for an old-school crooner, it’s hard to beat the straight-up blues bruisers like today’s SOTD.
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.
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.
Meet Me In Montauk 