Bob Dylan Love & Theft CD

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Bob Dylan's career has always been about defying expectations. Accordingly he followed 1997's much-heralded TIME OUT OF MIND with a marked about-face. Where its predecessor was a bleak emotional landscape full of languid atmospheres, existential sentiments, and graveyard vocal delivery, LOVE AND THEFT finds Dylan much more energized and hopeful. Instead of swamp-like textures, we get sharp, cracking bar-band blues, and lissome ballads with a '20s/'30s feel. The old codger has never sounded more spry; after observing that "summer days and summer nights are gone," he follows up with "I know a place where there's still something going on." Elsewhere he's variously hunting bear, standing on a table to make a toast, burning down a house, and starting a new empire.

The musical context for all this uproar is informed more heavily by Dylan's earliest Americana roots than anything other than his albums of traditional folk songs. Delta and Chicago blues are templates for many songs, while a few others even more anachronistically suggest a future for Dylan as ghost writer for Leon Redbone. The lyrics themselves are littered with quotes from/references to old blues tunes, but Dylan's classic non-linear structure and wild imagination allow him to transcend his influences even as he assimilates them.

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. 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. It's reminiscent of his classic records, but he's never made a record that's been such sheer, giddy fun as this, and it stands proudly among his very best albums. [In 2003, Columbia/Legacy reissued 15 selected tit

Originally released in 2001, this reissue is a hybrid CD consisting of remastered regular version playable on all players and a super audio CD version for players equipped with the format. 5.1 Surround Sound too! 12 tracks. Digipak. Sony. 2003.

LOVE AND THEFT won the 2002 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

Personnel: Bob Dylan (vocals, guitar, piano); Larry Campbell (guitar, banjo, mandolin); Charlie Sexton (guitar); Augie Meyers (accordion); David Kemper (drums); Clay Meyers (bongos).

Audio Mixer: Christopher Shaw .

Photographers: David Gahr; Kevin Mazur; DRolling Stone (1/03/02, p.118) - Ranked #1 in Rolling Stone's "Top 10 2001".
Rolling Stone (9/27/01, pp.65-6) - 5 stars out of 5 - "...A stone-cold Dylan classic... Talk about bringing it all back home: Dylan veers into country, ragtime, vaudeville, deep blues, cocktail-lounge corn, the minstrel show and the kind of rockabilly he must have bashed out with his high school band more than forty years ago..."
Spin (1/02, p.76) - Ranked #4 in Spin's "Albums of the Year 2001".
Spin (11/01, pp.127-8) - 9 out of 10 - "...Astonishing...It is the rare Dylan album recorded with his touring band, and the versatility and sympathy of this outfit...lets them stand proudly next to The Band as his finest accompanists...""
Entertainment Weekly (12/28/01, p.138) - Ranked #6 "Album of the Year" in EW's "Best of 2001".
Q (10/01, p.122) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...A very good album..."
Magnet (12-1/02, p.56) - Included in Magnet's "20 Best Albums of 2001".
CMJ (10/8/01, p.16) - "...Gritty and immediate..."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.66) - Ranked #15 in Mojo's "100 Modern Classics" -- "His surreal verbal collages borrowed imagery from vintage bluesmen and obscure novelists..."
Mojo (Publisher) (1/02, p.68) - Ranked #2 in Mojo's "Best [40] Albums of 2001".
Mojo (Publisher) (10/01, p.104) - "...The most striking thing about the album is Bob's singing, which possesses a ragged, almost sinister authority...but on the old-tyme numbers becomes a nonchalant croon..."