review

By the time they reach 60, most performers' work has been rubbed smooth by complacency and compromise, like an eroded stone--particularly if they're harnessed to a tour schedule of around 200 gigs per year. It says much for the seemingly limitless renewability of Bob Dylan's creative gifts that Love and Theft, his 43rd album, should sound as distinctive and intriguing in 2001 as his debut did nearly 40 years earlier. It's one of the most important albums of Dylan's career, being the follow-up to the Grammy-winning Time out of Mind which re-established him as a serious commercial prospect, at a time of life when even Mick Jagger might window-shop longingly for a nice cardie, slippers and a bag of Werther's Originals. And for once in his life, Dylan neither disappoints nor tries to wilfully destroy his reputation, but instead seems energised by the challenge.Read the entire review

Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone(US) [9-27-01]

"I don't like to think of myself in the highfalutin area," Bob Dylan said a few years ago. "I'm in the burlesque area." The man isn't kidding. Ever since 1969's Nashville Skyline, he's been scandalizing the faithful with fantasies of shedding all his poetic skins to be reborn as a song-and-dance man. On Love and Theft, his forty-third album, he turns this fantasy into a stone-cold Dylan classic. Love and Theft takes us on a full-blown tour of American song in all its burlesque splendor, which includes, of course, Dylan's own psychedelic mutations of the blues. 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. ...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.Read the entire review

Ben Greenman, The New Yorker(US) [9-10-01]

"Tweedle Dee" is sneakily profound; like the rest of the record, it has a light touch, both musically and lyrically. The idiosyncratic, jazzy ballad "Po' Boy" includes two jokes that seem targeted at first graders ("Called down to room service, says 'send up a room' "; "Knockin' on the door, I say 'Who is it, where you from?' / Man say 'Freddie,' I say 'Freddie who?' / He say 'Freddie or not, here I come' "). Upon closer inspection, of course, the songs are hardly buoyant: throughout, Dylan frets about age, treachery, and the galling puzzle of mortality. "Time Out of Mind" met the problem head-on, with sweeping, cinematic songs like "Tryin' to Get to Heaven" and "Not Dark Yet." "Love and Theft" is slipperier.Read the entire review Joel Selvin, San Francisco Chronicle(US) [9-9-01]

On his new album "Love and Theft," in stores Tuesday, Bob Dylan warbles like a seedy pop singer from an old black-and-white movie on "Moonlight," a song with an arching melody that could have been lifted from some obscure piece of '30s Tin Pan Alley claptrap. He summons the delicious image of a riverboat roue with a pencil-thin mustache and frayed cuffs as he tosses around lyrics like "the songbird's sweet, melodious tone" and "the geese into the countryside have flown." At first, it doesn't sound remotely like a song Dylan would sing. But he sings it like only Dylan could, his voice curling into a soft rasp that approaches a sneer but never quite gets there.

Nobody else could sing it this way, but that won't stop people from trying.

At age 60, songwriter Dylan is alternating between crunching blues and sweetly sentimental old-fashioned pop songs on "Love and Theft," his brilliant 43rd album sketching a misty Southern odyssey of the mind.

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Jim Farber, New York Daily News(US) [9-9-01]

Bob Dylan has been labeled many things in his 40-year career: protest singer and poet, rocker and revivalist, mush-mouth and myth. But never has he been celebrated as a charmer.

That may change with his latest release, "Love and Theft." It's a witty collection of wise blues songs that allow pop's great bard to scare up some serious fun.

Don't worry, pain junkies. It's not that Dylan has suddenly turned into a swooning crooner or a lightweight romantic. On the new album, he's dealing with as crushing a sense of disappointment and as many troubling enigmas as ever. But he adds a leavening layer of humor that transforms even his most biting asides and scathing put-downs into something generous and forgiving.

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Beack