The first track on Bob Dylan’s new album, Love and Theft (Columbia), makes one fear the worst. Hearing Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, with its careless rhymes and silly metaphors, you think: Oh no, not another Under the Red Sky. That 1990 album followed 1989’s excellent Oh Mercy, and dashed all the hopes it raised: it was a ramshackle affair on which the apparent attempt at casual simplicity ended up in nonsense and doggerel.
But Love and Theft is not another Under the Red Sky. Things get better after the first song. The second is Mississippi, which goes back a few years, possibly being an outtake from Time Out of Mind, one of Dylan’s patented outsider songs, loaded with the voice of experience.
That voice dominates Love and Theft, a voice like a workman’s overalls — stained and torn, but it keeps on keeping on. It is not quite the same as that of Time Out of Mind, which was almost gleefully gloomy, Dylan pitting his despair, albeit beautifully, against the studied antiquity of Daniel Lanois’s arrangements. Love and Theft is looser and muddier than the earlier album, very much a band album, not studied at all. It even sounds like Dylan is having fun, knocking out a set of 12 new songs as though they were old favourites he’d known all his life.
It seems Dylan has come full circle, returning to his early days as a folkie, ripping off and adapting familiar tunes and themes, twisting them to his own ends. The songs on Love and Theft sound like they’ve been in the vaults of some abandonded recording studio for half a century. There is the primitive rock’n’roll of Summer Days and Honest with Me, the sprightly shuffle of Bye and Bye, the lovely, lilting Moonlight. And there is the apocalyptic flood of High Water, and the brooding, regretful kiss-off that is Sugar Baby.
Dylan still has his demons — ”These memories I’ve got could strangle a man,” he sings — but the songs seem to be their catharsis. If few of the tunes are particularly memorable (though they may become so with time), the sense of ease is affecting.
And it seems a good time (now that Dylan is 60) to look back once again at his past achievements, as The Essential Bob Dylan (Columbia) does. The title is a misnomer, though, in that the essential Bob Dylan is really a run of five brilliant albums from the mid-Sixties, plus the incandescent masterpiece Blood on the Tracks (1975), half of Desire (1976), most of Oh Mercy and most of Time Out of Mind, plus a substantial handful of songs off other albums, but these 36 songs are as good an introduction to the man’s genius as you are likely to find in one package.
From his earliest signature tune, Blowin’ in the Wind, to last year’s Oscar-winner Things Have Changed, the most staggering lyrical intelligence in popular music is here, rushing through the amphetamine dreams of Mr Tambourine Man and Like a Rolling Stone, distilled to crystal clarity in I Want You and If Not for You. In these 36 songs on two CDs, the most prodigious single songwriting talent of our time is comprehensively respresented, but not contained.