"Love and Theft"

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Music reviews of "Love and Theft"

Music Review: Dylan gives us a history of the blues with a twist . . . .
Rating: 5 Stars

Dylan's miracle working knows no stopping, and with this release, he single-handedly creates an homage to the blues and yet captures all the tensions therein this particular genre. It's truly a greatest hits album, but not of Dylan, but rather the blues. That is the central paradox of this album. He has created a blues album which is simultaneously being torn in two directions, which epitomises the genre itself in the 1930s to the 1950s.

LOVE AND THEFT certainly marks its roots in the blues. Just a little over half the album plays like the successor that this record is to the 1997's smash TIME OUT OF MIND in the sense that it feels really bluesy but without the death obsession that its predecessor had. The other half, (these five tracks: Summer Day, Bye and Bye, Floater, Moonlight, and Po' Boy) sound like they call come from the same synapses of Dylan's brain, as their sound blur into one another. The best way to describe it is it sounds like old, simple bluesy folk compositions with a real 1930s to 1940s feel too it. Summer Day's intro reminds me of old 1950s rock, but then transform back into the similar feel of the aforementioned tracks. On first listening thru these songs, I found myself wanting to skip them, but on second listen I became more impressed with the compositions. It's as if Dylan wanted to make old scratchy records without the scratches from the Depression Era, and generally he is successful. Although I never thought I would make this analogy, the track "Moonlight" reminds me of old Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra.

Because this is the release immediately after TIME OUT OF MIND, an album that won Dylan critical praise and renewed interest, I feel I need to clarify LOVE AND THEFT's relationship to TIME OUT OF MIND. TIME OUT OF MIND, which plays like a concept album about death and being in love with a woman he wishes he wasn't, feels like BLOOD ON THE TRACKS aged twenty or so years, and an utter weariness permeates the proceedings. (Taken in this context, "To Make You Feel My Love" stands as one of the most depressing and pained things Dylan ever wrote).

And just like BLOOD ON THE TRACKS and DESIRE, TIME OUT OF MIND and LOVE AND THEFT are two completely different albums. BLOOD and TOOM are very personal albums. DESIRE has a weird world beat, and LOVE AND THEFT, although much closer to TOOM in its musical foundation (for both share blues as their central structure), loses the intimacy of TOOM, which creates yet another paradox, because TOOM has all the intimate factors that make Blues feel so personal to us, and yet LOVE AND THEFT loses that feeling of raw intimacy and yet it better captures the blues genre that TOOM does. TOOM is personal application of Blues principles, where LOVE AND THEFT is more of a textbook study of the tensions of the blues genre.

LOVE AND THEFT keeps the same blues base, but ultimately TIME OUT OF MIND is ultimately the bluesier in the modern context of the two records because there is more of a cohesian of the pain and more commonly perceived blues elements. Each song adds the pain felt in the previous song, making it like a snowball effect and culminating in the 16 minute closer "Highlands". Ironically, though, this record captures more of the blues tradition and the genre's myriad influences, although time may have obscured this. This tension between those old scratchy folk sounding songs and the more commonly perceived bluesy material creates a tension that is not felt on TIME OUT OF MIND at all. Side 1 (the first six songs), opens with two blues, then two of the other, then another one that's like TOOM, and then ends with "Floater". Side 2 is a similar story. Dylan's sequencing proves absolutely essential on this release, for without it the tension would simply be lost. A very notable composition is "Highwater (for Charlie Patton)*," which sounds like a close relative of "Ballad of Hollis Brown," and straddles the fence quite appropriately between the blues and folk but with more emphasis on folk. Because folk's influence on blues is never made more explicit in the context of this record than on here, "Highwater" stands as a very important link to the song cycle that is LOVE AND THEFT.

Dylan said of LOVE AND THEFT that the songs don't really have any genetic history, and that they're probably not like his previous works. Dylan said he thought of it more like a greatest hits album, either Volume I or II. There weren't any hits on this record -- at least, not YET.

Again, Dylan proves the most perceptive of his work. Although LOVE AND THEFT's closest relation in Dylan's catalogue is TIME OUT OF MIND, it stands as a greatest hits record of blues' history and the struggle with in the genre to find its own sound, and yet these are all new songs created by Dylan in the new millennium. That is the central paradox of LOVE AND THEFT, and what makes it so incredibly interesting.

*If you have any information on him please email me.

Description of "Love and Theft"

Classic Rock CDs

• Music > Styles
• Folk
• Pop
• Rock