An old-time Bob Dylan like this has never been seen before

September 11, 2001, New York. A date, a place, and a tragedy that no one can forget. The watershed between the old and new millennium. An event of such magnitude that everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when they learned the news of the attack on the Twin Towers. That unthinkable day when two planes flew into two skyscrapers. In the days immediately following American radio stations received a list of songs that would have been better left unbroadcast: some because they were “lyrically questionable”, others for political reasons.

But September 11, 2001 is also the day that the 31st studio album by was released.Bob Dylan, “Love and theft”What you can read below is our review of that album.

A Dylan from another era like this has never been seen before. 12 songs literally “out of time”, out of time, far from the musical present and out of fashion. It was well known that Dylan didn’t give a damn about anything and everyone, that he was a contrarian who liked to shock the public. Some will remember the electric turn, the country turn, the mystical turn, and we could go on for a while. Is this album “the swing/blues turn”? Not really, it’s hard to still talk in these terms about the supreme prophet of rock. He’s literally on another planet now.

“Love and theft” has taken and will take everyone by surprise.

It was announced by Dylan himself in a couple of unexpected interviews a couple of months ago, and it aroused a lot of curiosity. Some had called it “Nashville skyline” part two, or a hypothetical continuation of that work that, at the end of the ’60s, marked a (temporary) country turn for Dylan. The album, instead, is an almost literal confirmation of the words that Dylan, for once less cryptic than usual in his statements, said to the American newspaper USA Today last July 16: “All the songs are variations on the theme of the 12 bars and on melodies based on the blues. The music in this case is an electronic grid, while the lyrics are the sub-structure that holds it all together”.

Of course, there is nothing electronic in this album, as was easy to predict. For the rest, it is a matter of decidedly retro melodies, lyrically structured in the form of a blues and country ballad, rich in literary quotations: from “The Great Gatsby” by Francis Scott Fitzgerald (the phrase “you can’t repeat the past”, taken up in “Summer days”), to Shakespeare (Othello and Desdemona, in “Po’ boy” and Romeo and Juliet in “Floater”).

Without a hitch, Dylan goes from the blues (“Honest with me”, “Cry awhile”, “Lonesome day blues”) to rockabilly (“Tweedle dee and tweedle dum”, “Summer days”), from country (“High country”, “Po’ Bo”) to swing (“By and by”, “Moonlight”), exploring territories practically never explored in his long career. A round of applause, in this ride, goes to the band, which is the one that recently accompanied him on his “Never ending tour”. Larry Campbell, David Kemper, Tony Garnier and Charlie Sexton, with the addition of keyboardist Augie Myers. “Love and theft”, in short, does not represent any turning point, but only the umpteenth great confirmation of an artist who, after almost forty years of career, has not yet stopped changing and surprising.