Track Listing

1. Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum
2. Mississippi
3. Summer Days
4. Bye And Bye
5. Lonesome Day Blues
6. Floater (Too Much To Ask)
7. High Water (For Charley Patton)
8. Moonlight
9. Honest With Me
10. Po' Boy
11. Cry A While
12. Sugar Baby

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7945 in Music
• Released on: 2004-03-29
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Original recording remastered

CD Description
Bob Dylan's career has always been about defying expectations. Accordingly he followed 1997's much-heralded TIME OUT OFMIND 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 daysand summer nights are gone," he follows up with "I know a place where there's still something going on." Elsewhere he'svariously 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 hisalbums 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.

Customer Reviews

How is this possible?
Thirty-nine years since his Woody Guthrie-pilfering debut and Bob Dylan's last studio album to date was unveiled, his first one since 1997's impressive Time Out Of Mind.

Bob Dylan's voice is now shot. Some would say he could never sing anyway - though some parts of Blood On The Tracks would disprove this - but now it is indisputable; blame it on whatever you want, cigarettes, old age, but his singing is now but a fractured croak.

The most ridiculous thing about Love And Theft is that somehow his lack of vocal strength seems to make the album better. In a musical climate when bands like the Strokes blow away all their good songs on one album and burn out by their sophomore effort, that fact that Dylan is still making records this good boggles the mind.

Mississipi is one of the best songs he's every written, fact. Most of the songs are ruminations on old age and fading heroes, and Mississipi is a perfect example of this. The slow-burning closer Sugar Baby is nearly as good, whereas comparitively simple blues numbers put most modern day artists to shame in the space of four minutes.

Love And Theft is essential for anyone, whether a Dylan fan or not, it is truly, absolutely exceptional.

Piercing charm of the troubadour's troubled songbook!
It took me four and a half years to really understand this album, but at last, I can say it's up there with Blood on the Tracks and Blonde on Blonde in the top three Dylan albums!! As he says himself: "The songs don't have any genetic history. Is it like "Time Out Of Mind" or "Oh Mercy" or "Blood On The Tracks" or whatever? Probably not. I think of it more as a greatest-hits album, volume one or volume two. Without the hits - not yet, anyway. [The songs] are variations on the 12-bar theme and blues-based melodies. The music here is an electronic grid, the lyrics being the structure that holds it all together" Bob Dylan June 2001. Therein lies the key to the whole great travelling troubadour show that is this masterpiece!

"Love And Theft" Bob Dylan's forty-third album was released on September 11th 2001, a date that will stay in most people's minds for an entirely different reason. Few, if any, contemporary musicians can claim that sort of output, and coming almost forty years after the release of his debut album, "Love And Theft" sees Dylan at the very top of his game, indeed history may record this as his masterpiece. Having been written off so often by so many, he greeted the new millennium with an album of such quality that it would surprise even his most diehard admirers. Here is a collection of twelve potential classics spanning the entire gamut of popular music styles in which Dylan and his excellent backing band do not put a foot wrong. Blues, rock, swing and bluegrass, it's all here, some of it surprising but all of it handled in masterly fashion, due in no small part to the superlative work of multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell and bassist Tony Garnier who has played with Dylan longer and more often than anybody. But let's not forget the writing, an area where Dylan is still head and shoulders above his nearest rival, and here he proves once again that he is the best wordsmith on the planet. All of Dylan's favourite themes are here, disillusionment, despair, betrayal, broken relationships and alienation and he even throws in a few jokes for good measure, all delivered with deadpan adroitness. Coming four years after the triple Grammy winner "Time Out Of Mind" this album would also be awarded a Grammy, for best contemporary folk album, and Rolling Stone magazine gave it five stars, the first album to receive such an accolade since R.E.M.'s "Automatic For The People" in 1992. For the first time since the heady days of the sixties, Dylan had followed a brilliant album with an even better one.

Older Dylan... Deeper performances
What can I say about the man itself that hasn't been said before? Well first and foremost this record just blew me away (nothing new right?)... this is a relatively new record and I find Dylan so profound on the way he's addressing the lyrics, his older voice is even more flexible to get you into the those amazing lyrics, he just has even more feeling now... believe it or not.
Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash had this ability of taking a lyric and rip it apart with the way they sing... and this record is a clear example.
Also the record has a collection of songs from many styles from blues to rock n' roll and moody slow songs... Dylan at its best, don't miss it!

Let the music play!