Bob Dylan - Love And Theft

Love And Theft is the thirty first studio album by American singer songwriter Bob Dylan, originally released in September 2001 via Columbia Records.

Time Out Of Mind was a legitimate comeback, Bob Dylan's first collection of original songs in nearly ten years and a risky rumination on mortality, but its sequel, Love And Theft, is his true return to form, not just his best album since Blood On The Tracks, but the loosest, funniest, warmest record he's made since The Basement Tapes.

At sixty, Dylan's subject matter was much the same as it had been for the previous ten years - the world has gone wrong, the women are doing him wrong - but his tone has shifted. The arrival of the apocalypse, the breaking of his heart - on Love And Theft, these become not lamentations but cosmic jokes.

There are none of the foreboding, apocalyptic warnings that permeated Time Out Of Mind and even underpinned "Things Have Changed", his Oscar-winning theme to Curtis Hanson's 2000 film Wonder Boys. Just as important, Daniel Lanois' deliberately arty, diffuse production has retreated into the mist, replaced by an uncluttered, resonant production that gives Dylan and his ace backing band room to breathe. And they run wild with that liberty, rocking the house with the grinding "Lonesome Day Blues" and burning it down with the fabulously swinging "Summer Days".

They're equally captivating on the slower songs, whether it's the breezily romantic "Bye And Bye", the torch song "Moonlight", or the epic reflective closer, "Sugar Baby".

Musically, Dylan hasn't been this natural or vital since he was with the Band, and even then, those records were never as relaxed and easy or even as hard-rocking as these. That alone would make Love And Theft a remarkable achievement, but they're supported by a tremendous set of songs that fully synthesize all the strands in his music, from the folksinger of the early '60s, through the absurdist storyteller of the mid-'60s, through the traditionalist of the early '70s, to the grizzled professional of the '90s.

None of this is conscious, it's all natural. There's an ease to his writing and a swagger to his performance unheard in years - he's cracking jokes and murmuring wry asides, telling stories, crooning, and swinging.

The remarkable achievement of Love And Theft is that Dylan makes the past sound as strange, haunted and alluring as the future - and this song-and-dance man sings as though he's drunk too deeply of the past to be either scared or impressed by anybody's future, least of all his own. And he sounds like he's enjoying the ride.

Check out the tracks: “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum” and “Mississippi”.

This double LP is a Music On Vinyl, 2012 remaster, reissued on 180 Gram Audiophile Vinyl with printed inner sleeves, pressed in Europe.