"Love And Theft"

About

Was it somehow 1964 again? In May 2001, Bob Dylan—without a producer, but with the trusty band he’d built for his Never Ending Tour—entered a studio in New York and left with an album after only 12 day. Only four months later, that record, <i>“Love and Theft”</i>, arrived on September 11, 2001. Rather than getting lost amid the world-altering currents of the day, the album once again turned Dylan into a voice of reason, spotting catastrophe on the horizon and leveling with it. “Well, today has been a sad and lonesome day,” he sang rather uncannily at the start of a growling blue, repeating the line for good measure. “I’m just sitting here thinking/My mind a million miles away.” Though <i>“Love and Theft”</i> would never entirely escape the context of its release date, this is the record in which Dylan begins to have fun again—where he sounds like he’s thrilled to be in the studio, leading a band of his design and dream, as he sings about Shakespeare, boxing, and booty call. On the road, Dylan had been teaching his band about the atavistic music of the United State, revealing blue, country, and jazz sounds that were nearly a century old. By the time they arrived in the studio, they were steeped in the stuff, and the joy they find in it is obvious: the woozy organ shuffle of “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum”; the ghoulish backwoods swagger of “High Water (For Charley Patton)”; the balladic drift of “Moonlight.” If the intense <i>Time Out of Mind</i> sessions in 1997 had been about discovery, these were about delivery. To wit, the mighty band down in Miami had struggled with “Mississippi,” a gorgeous reckoning with existential upheaval, as Lanois insisted it sounded too old-fashioned; in New York, Dylan’s road band offered it up as a creeping country epic, no apologie. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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