This is Bob Dylan for you in this decade. You listen to this one and you realise that Dylan’s a rare artist who didn’t burn out in the 60s. He sings about the harsh things in a voice more mature and cold than ever before. And it runs through all the songs. The opening song Beyond Here Lies Nothing is plain, straight and uncompromising. It’s all good opens with straight piercing comment — “Big politician telling lies/Restaurant kitchen, all full of flies/Don’t make a bit of a bit of difference…brick by brick, they tear
you down/A teacup of water is enough to drown.”
The stand-out track in this album definitely is I See A Change Coming On with a sense of irony in his voice. “State gone broke/The county's dry/Don’t be looking at me with that evil eye”— it’s an ugly picture of today’s America — cold and cruel face of the nation. And Dylan tries to hold a mirror.
Honestly, it’s a mix bag. Some lyrics are raw in places but the starkness and the directness of them pierces you on more than once occasion. It lacks the instant drawing quality of his last album The Modern Times but holds your interest long enough for you to start humming these new Dylan numbers.
Love and theft, 2001It may not be as good as his last album Time Out of Mind, but it jumps from genre to genre with ease, as if Dylan were traversing the American musical landscape in search of thrills, revenge and reparation. Love and Theft comes on as a musical autobiography that also sounds like a casual, almost accidental history of the country. And the voice you hear on this album is not that of the cocky young rock star who broke down folk by simply strapping on an electric guitar, nor is it the vengeful and grumpy man who dripped Blood on the Tracks. This Dylan is older, wiser, sweeter and more sanguine if still unsettled too.
Modern Times, 2006
“War and love are in the air/It’s time to get right with the Lord/maybe go back up north and try his hand at farming,” says the first song on this album, Thunder on the Mountain. It starts with the sound of God and women running to get out of the town — undoubtedly the album is full of prophecy. His 31st studio record, it was cut in New York over the course of a little more than a month with Dylan’s road band, which had a mere 113 shows of the Never Ending Tour under its belt.
The songs are almost evenly divided between blues ready-mades and old-timely two-steps. With this one, Dylan made an album that could stand alongside the accomplishments of his wild youth. Love and Theft, recorded when he’d turned 60, saw his toughest guitar rock since Blonde on Blonde in 1966. Modern Times is different; it has a lot of clarity without any digital murk.
