Things Come Alive
by Nigel Hinton

Early Impressions
I love this album. The kitchen sink is there - the whole gamut of human emotions; and he hasn't revealed this richness of himself since the mid ‘70s. All the other albums since then have been narrower in scope, more single-minded, often charmlessly earnest, less capacious. They haven't had the warmth and joy and silliness and observed detail of everyday life and capacity for wonder that he reveals here. He's re-discovered that you can be complex: serious and comic, cynical and loving, despairing and hopeful all at the same time. And, as we've noticed in the past, this new mood was somewhat prefigured in the last song of the previous album: ‘Highlands’. He was unable to change places with all the young women and men but he's discovered that there is another kind of pleasure and reconciliation to be found in his sixtieth year.

I said I love the album and I want to point out that this includes the jokes. The cornier the better. They are part of what makes the album feel the 'warmest' since Blood On The Tracks/Desire. I like the person who made these songs on "Love And Theft" more than the person who made all the records since the mid-‘70s. There is, in addition to all the other tones and themes and seriousness, an approachability, a warmth, a sense of fun that is nice to be around. The silly jokes are so self-consciously silly. He's like an old grandfather cracking corny jokes to the kids who groan and laugh simultaneously. It makes the no-more-serious Time Out Of Mind sound like the work of a monotonous old grouch, for instance. It makes the no-more-spiritually-concerned religious songs of the ‘70/’80s sound like the ravings of Ehud Barak.

It's also wonderful to have some new aphorisms to match the quality of those ‘from the ‘60s' masterpieces. I remember it back then, it was like having a living prophet (though of humanistic tendencies). All these years later he is still presenting us with suitable maxims as we struggle through this ‘jolly’ world of treachery and lies. ‘Every minute of existence seems like a dirty trick’ but ‘I've got nothing but affection for all those who've sailed with me’. I find lines popping in to my head as I go through my everyday life: turn on the radio or TV and ‘Things're breaking up out there...’, climb the stairs too fast and I'm forced to face the fact that ‘I'm short on gas, my motor's startin' to stall’.

A Few Weeks Later
I said that I loved the album immediately. I spent the next couple of weeks trying to keep my enthusiasm within bounds, telling myself not to rush in to babbling out some over the top statement that I would come to regret. But deep inside myself I couldn't suppress my real feeling, which was growing stronger with each play - that I was loving the album more than I had loved anything since the mid 70s. All the other albums which I had defended and over praised during those 25 years - Infidels, Oh Mercy, under the red sky, Time Out Of Mind - I could at last admit as being essentially minor works. Of course, much better than almost anything else in anyone else's canon, but side by side with Bob's truly towering masterpieces they were inferior and I'd been fooling myself every time I'd pretended that they weren't.

Along comes "Love And Theft", though, and it's obvious to me. No excuses needed, no indulgence required for a fading talent: this is the real thing again - an unquestionable masterpiece to rank with his greatest work. And how can I be so sure? Because it is so unexpected, so groundbreaking, so varied, so surprising, so daring. It makes my jaw fall open with the newness of it, just like the masterpieces of the ‘60s did when he redefined everything. Infidels, Empire Burlesque, Oh Mercy, Time Out Of Mind all now seem like expected, almost predictable, pieces of Bob Dylan work - going over well-known terrain, hammering away at old themes, using familiar styles of language and music - most of them using the authorial tone of voice that we had become used to with Dylan. Some of it even feeling a bit like standard 'Rock' repertoire material. "Love And Theft" astonishes with its invention, with its quantum leap elsewhere. And how does he do this with (a) a worn out, limited voice (but which he uses with such intelligence and grace and wit that it becomes a transcendent instrument which imbues lines which, on paper look weak-ish, with genuine power and beauty so that they become, sung, at least as great as any line of great poetry, read) and (b) a rag-bag of lines and phrases and familiar genres? It's a miracle. He is a genius still.

A Continuing Delight
I love it more and more and think that it stands with the very, very best he's ever done. What I particularly like about it is that it is an album which is what it is rather than being about what it is; it distils the emotion or thought and becomes it rather than talks about it.

"Love And Theft" is about the experience of being a sixty year old Bob, without ever talking about the experience of being a 60 year old Bob. It is how he sees the world, how he feels the world. In the same way as his works of genius from the mid-‘60s were about the chaos he saw round him, and actually were works of chaos - jangling and mad, filled with tumbling, crumbling words and images of craziness, this album is about the experience of being what he is now. He doesn't talk about what it's like to be an old guy with grandchildren to whom you say silly things to make them laugh, he is the old guy saying silly things to make us laugh.

There's a marvellous example in ‘Summer Days’. The summer days and summer nights of his life might be gone, people might think he's a worn-out star but he knows a place where it's still going on - the music he's playing. And when he enjoins us to lift up our glasses and sing, he really is, through this wonderful reconstruction of Sun-tinged rockabilly, proposing a toast to the King. The medium is the message, The message is the medium. Extraordinary art. And the only truly appropriate way of talking about it would be to make a similarly wonderful record about "Love And Theft" in the style of "Love And Theft", in the same way as he has made a wonderful record about the power and joy of rockabilly by its own terms.

Or in ‘Sugar Baby’, how the structure of the melody joined to the structure of the lyrics and his phrasing means that there are unexpected breaks in the delivery, moments where it is of necessity speeded up, moments where it is of necessity slowed down, leaving phrases temporarily incomplete - so that the experience of listening to it becomes one of experiencing fracture and fragility, vulnerability and tenderness, rather than having him simply make it the subject of the song.

In ‘Bye and Bye’ he actually is singing love's praises with sugar coated rhyme.

And while I'm at it, isn't the ‘Lonesome Day Blues’ verse about remembering his mother, just wonderful? And so true about how these moments happen. You're in your car/truck, about forty miles from the mill. You drop it in to overdrive, turn on the radio and - out of nowhere and for no perceptible reason - comes a sudden feeling of longing and that it would be just great to see your dead mother again and tell her about all the things that have happened since she's gone. I was driving in my car yesterday when this verse came on and it made me miss my mother so much. So powerful is his evocation of such a moment, he evoked such a moment in me.

And what about the wind whispering verse, where in the repeated line he suddenly drops in the additional 'something' (half-heard) like the something he half heard when the wind was whispering? Oh so simple and so perfect. He doesn't just describe it, he makes it happen to the listener, too.

To think that he could do something so new and surprising after all these years is heartening. It makes all those sort of standard rock records he's made since the mid-‘80s (even including Oh Mercy and Time Out Of Mind) now look so obvious, almost pedestrian. With "Love And Theft" he's truly broken the boundaries again. I have to say it is in my top three and that there are certain moments on it that seem to me among the best things he's ever done.