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Dylan growls his way to sheer beauty
bob dylan: love and theft
BY LUCAS HANFT
Love and Theft, Bob Dylan's latest album, courses with life, with joy, with the intoxicated pulse of Bacchanalian dances and drunken tears. For the first time since Blood on the Tracks, Dylan successfully emotes in every way, raiding the decades of his own spiritual fever chart. Love and Theft is an album filled with toasts and celebrations, but it is the morning-after hangovers, the songs of guilt and stumbling, that are the finest. What Dylan has done here is mine the different musical loves of his life, moving between bluegrass, rockabilly, '40s-style crooning, and country. The emotional architecture is what ties it together. He may be throwing off a lyric, twisting a cliché, or writing a poem, but because of his singing, his wonderfully refined growl, sentiment seeps through the speakers. His loves and joys, his losses and regrets—but ultimately his survival—slide through with a lyrical grace that is pure Dylan.
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Dylan's music is, and most probably always will be, about atmosphere: as Bono once said, you don't need to hear the words he's saying, just how he says them. And that's certainly true for Love and Theft. The way his voice bends now, hitting the notes and then backing away from them, almost shy to admit he knows the tune adds up to more than the sum of its parts. There's an intangible power to his singing, a detail that cannot be verbally quantified. His voice is the smoothest sandpaper around. To be sure, Time Out Of Mind benefited from his haggard delivery, his world-weariness; but he feels more comfortable in his new throat, more willing to use his voice as an instrument and not as a chore, more willing to have fun. He sings with such conviction, such confidence, expressing joy and pathos simultaneously, that you see he's a vocalist on par with the greatest ever. As was the case with Billie Holiday, soul—passion, a connection with himself and with his material—means more than technical precision.
"Sugar Baby," the last and finest song on the album, a lover send-off along the lines of "It Ain't Me Babe" or "Don't Think Twice" or "Abandoned Love," is lyrically brilliant to be sure, but it derives much of its power from Dylan's vocal performance. That crick in his voice becomes a startling tool—he sings as if his heart is literally in his throat. "Sugar Baby" is powerful music. What's more, you cannot imagine another voice singing it. It's as pure Dylan as anything off Blonde on Blonde, as teary-eyed and haggard as those early recordings were subversive. With both you're intoxicated, drunk on the sound, quivering at the nuances of Dylan's lyrics and singing.
The fact of the matter is that this record is a masterpiece of the new Bob Dylan, the latest (and perhaps final) incarnation of America's greatest song-and-dance man. Its sound is so fresh, the performances so vibrant, the music pulsating with such rhythmic elegance, that if I didn't know it was Dylan, I'd be hailing a new savior of pop music. But this recording could not be a first effort: the album comes from a historical sense of what music was, and an idea of what music should be.
Forty years ago Dylan wandered through snowdrifts in Greenwich Village, a self-defined image in his mind, ready to be shown to the public. And now he's finally convinced us of the legend he fashioned for himself. His home is a tour bus and the stage is where he becomes what he has always wanted to be. Dylan has finally become the Dylan we all hoped he was—the lonesome hobo, the ghost of electricity, Einstein disguised as Robin Hood. He's a little Robert Johnson, a little Blind Willie McTell, a little Elvis. He's more Dylan now than ever. Sit up and take note. (Columbia)
All materials © 2001 The Yale Herald, Inc., and its staff.
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