"Love and Theft" is the 31st studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on September 11, 2001, by Columbia Records. It featured backing by his touring band of the time, with keyboardist Augie Meyers added for the sessions. It peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200, and has been certified Gold by the RIAA.[5] A limited edition release included two bonus tracks on a separate disc recorded in the early 1960s, and two years later, on September 16, 2003, this album was remixed into 5.1 surround sound and became one of 15 Dylan titles reissued and remastered for SACD playback.
Love and Theft was the first album Dylan recorded with his Never Ending Tour road band. This is a trend that would continue with his subsequent eight studio albums. Guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell recalls Dylan showing him the chord changes for the new song “Po' Boy” shortly after the band had recorded Dylan's Oscar-winning original song "Things Have Changed" in 1999: “They were relatively sophisticated changes for a Bob Dylan song […] That was the first inkling of what the material might be like—taking elements from the jazz era and adding a folk sensibility to it".[6]
David Kemper, Dylan's drummer at the time, described in an interview how the sound of Love and Theft arose from lessons the band had absorbed from Dylan: "I didn’t realise we were actually headed somewhere. I wasn’t smart enough to realise: you are in the School of Bob. But when we went in to record Love And Theft, I realised then, because the influences were really so old on that record. It comes from really early Americana, way back at the turn of the century, and the 1920s. And not everybody in the band was familiar with that style of playing. And I know that the songs that he would bring in would be these amazing examples of early Americana. Nobody that I know, knows as much about American music as Bob Dylan. He has spent so much time trying to understand, and collecting these songs—it was like a never stopping resource. He was always coming up with these songs or artists that I had never heard of. And then when we went in and recorded Love And Theft it was like, oh my God, he’s been teaching us this music—not literally these songs, but these styles. And as a band, we’re familiar with every one of these. That’s why we could cut a song a day […] and the album was done".[7]
As Kemper indicated, the twelve songs on "Love and Theft" were recorded in just 12 days in May 2001 at Clinton Recording in Midtown Manhattan. The recording sessions were notable for their spontaneity. According to engineer Chris Shaw, “What surprised me was how quickly [Dylan] would abandon an arrangement when he was working. He’d say, ‘What’s the tempo? Let’s do it in F and drop the tempo down and do it like a Western swing tune, and I want the drummer to play brushes, not drums.’ And suddenly the song was completely different. Nothing was set in stone until he found that key, tempo and style that fit that vocal and that lyric”.[8]
For his part, Dylan had been interested in working with Chris Shaw when he heard Shaw had gotten his start on Public Enemy's early records.[9] Dylan praised Shaw's work as an engineer during a press conference in Rome to promote "Love and Theft" in 2001: After complaining that previous producers had botched the recording of his vocals, he was asked if he felt it was difficult to record his voice in the studio. Dylan referenced Shaw when he responded, "I don't think so […] On this particular record we had a young guy who understood how to do it."[10] Dylan would subsequently employ Shaw to engineer and mix his albums Modern Times (2006) and Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) as well as various non-album tracks.
Content
The album continued Dylan's artistic comeback following 1997's Time Out of Mind and was given an even more enthusiastic reception. The title of the album was apparently inspired by historian Eric Lott's book Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, which was published in 1993. "Love and Theft becomes his Fables of the Reconstruction, to borrow an R.E.M. album title", writes Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune (published September 11, 2001), "the myths, mysteries and folklore of the South as a backdrop for one of the finest roots rock albums ever made".
The opening track, "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum", includes many references to parades in Mardi Gras in New Orleans, where participants are masked, and "determined to go all the way" of the parade route, in spite of being intoxicated. "It rolls in like a storm, drums galloping over the horizon into ear shot, guitar riffs slicing with terse dexterity while a tale about a pair of vagabonds unfolds," writes Kot. "It ends in death, and sets the stage for an album populated by rogues, con men, outcasts, gamblers, gunfighters and desperados, many of them with nothing to lose, some of them out of their minds, all of them quintessentially American.
They're the kind of twisted, instantly memorable characters one meets in John Ford's westerns, Jack Kerouac's road novels, but, most of all, in the blues and country songs of the 1920s, '30s and '40s. This is a tour of American music—jump blues, slow blues, rockabilly, Tin Pan Alley ballads, Country Swing—that evokes the sprawl, fatalism and subversive humor of Dylan's sacred text, Harry Everett Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, the pre-rock voicings of Hank Williams [Sr.], Charley Patton and Johnnie Ray, among others, and the ultradry humor of Groucho Marx.
As music critic Tim Riley notes, "[Dylan's] singing [on Love and Theft] shifts artfully between humble and ironic...'I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound,' he sings in 'Floater,' which is either hilarious or horrifying, and probably a little of both".[11]
"Love and Theft is, as the title implies, a kind of homage," writes Kot, "[and] never more so than on 'High Water (for Charley Patton),' in which Dylan draws a sweeping portrait of the South's racial history, with the unsung blues singer as a symbol of the region's cultural richness and ingrained social cruelties. Rumbling drums and moaning backing vocals suggest that things are going from bad to worse. 'It's tough out there,' Dylan rasps. 'High water everywhere.' Death and dementia shadow the album, tempered by tenderness and wicked gallows humor".
"'Po' Boy', scored for guitar with lounge chord jazz patterns, 'almost sounds as if it could have been recorded around 1920", says Riley. "He leaves you dangling at the end of each bridge, lets the band punctuate the trail of words he's squeezed into his lines, which gives it a reluctant soft-shoe charm".
The album closes with "Sugar Baby", a lengthy, dirge-like ballad, noted for its evocative, apocalyptic imagery and sparse production drenched in echo. Praising it as "a finale to be proud of", Riley notes that "Sugar Baby" is "built on a disarmingly simple riff that turns foreboding".
In a Rolling Stone interview with Mikal Gilmore, Dylan himself summarized the album's themes as dealing with "business, politics and war, and maybe love interest on the side".[12]
Release and promotion
Bob Dylan in the poker-themed "Love and Theft" commercial
Although no singles were released from the album, Dylan appeared in a 30-second commercial featuring the song "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" that appeared online on August 28, 2001, and on network television beginning on September 3, 2001. The spot, directed by Kinka Usher, shows Dylan in a tense poker game with magician Ricky Jay, actress Francine York and Dharma & Greg writer Eddie Gorodetsky. The poker setting was Dylan's idea and, according to Usher, he only made one request of the director: "He said, `You know, I just don't want it to be corporate'. And I assured him that I wasn't going to do that, I was going to shoot it like a little film. I know he's very happy with it".[13]
Dylan also consented to what, for him, was an unusual amount of interviews with press to promote the album. On July 23, 2001 he participated in a press conference at the Hotel de la Ville in Rome[14] with reporters from Austria, Britain, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.[15] He was also interviewed by Edna Gundersen for USA Today,[16]Robert Hilburn for the Los Angeles Times[17] and Mikal Gilmore for Rolling Stone.[18] All of these interviews appeared shortly before or shortly after the album's release on September 11, 2001.
Packaging
The album's cover features a black-and-white photograph of Dylan, sporting a then-new pencil-thin mustache, which was taken in the studio by Kevin Mazur. The back cover features a black-and-white portrait of Dylan taken by photographer David Gahr. Mazur also took the album's inside cover photo of Dylan and the Love and Theft band (including organist Augie Meyers). The album's art direction is credited to Geoff Gans.[19]
In a glowing review for his "Consumer Guide" column published by The Village Voice, Robert Christgau wrote: "If Time Out of Mind was his death album—it wasn't, but you know how people talk—this is his immortality album".[31] Later, when The Village Voice conducted its annual Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, Love and Theft topped the list, the third Dylan album to accomplish this.[32][33] It also topped Rolling Stone's list.[34]Q listed Love and Theft as one of the best 50 albums of 2001.[35]Kludge ranked it at number eight on their list of best albums of 2001.[36]
In 2003, the album was ranked number 467 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, climbing to number 385 in the 2012 update and dropping to number 411 in the 2020 update of the list.[37]Newsweek magazine pronounced it the second best album of its decade.[38] In 2009, Glide Magazine ranked it as the No. 1 Album of the Decade.[39]Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "The predictably unpredictable rock poet greeted the new millennium with a folksy, bluesy instant classic".[40]
In a 2020 list of "Bob Dylan's 10 greatest albums" in Far Out magazine, Love and Theft was ranked seventh. An article accompanying the list characterized the album as one in which "Dylan turns into a historian and showcases the music which moves him. It is another rootsy affair and one which feels capable of stirring up the ghosts of music past all on its own".[41] A 2020 article at the Ultimate Classic Rock website also placed Love and Theft seventh in the Dylan pantheon, noting that it "plays like an attic-sweeping of songs and themes Dylan and others left behind over the years" and that it evokes "long-gone musical spirits from the other turn of the century".[42] Finally, Glide Magazine likewise placed Love and Theft seventh in a comprehensive list ranking all of Dylan's albums, writing that "Dylan here pulls readers through a bevy of American song traditions" and that "each song recaptures and renews a sub-genre that influenced Dylan’s career".[43] Ian O'Riordan, in a 2021 article in the Irish Times, ranked the album sixth out of the 39, praising David Kemper's drumming and citing "Lonesome Day Blues" as his favourite track.[44]
Critic Jake Cole, in a 2021 Spectrum Culture article celebrating the album's 20th anniversary, referred to it as Dylan's most eclectic work "from the storming rock of 'Lonesome Day Blues' to the gorgeous slow-dance lounge number 'Moonlight', which points straight at Dylan’s later Great American Songbook phase of the 2010s. In that sense, 'Love and Theft' might be the closest that Dylan ever came to capturing the spirit of his lauded Rolling Thunder Revue tour in the studio. If that roadshow was conceived as a way to rummage through folk tradition and feeding it into some kind of interpretive revivalism, this album codifies that approach into a freewheeling tour of blues, jazz, country and folk, all of it wrangled into a form of rock so rustic that even roots rock sounds modern compared to it".[46]
Allegations of plagiarism
Love and Theft generated controversy when some similarities between the album's lyrics and Japanese writer Junichi Saga's book Confessions of a Yakuza were pointed out.[47][48] Translated to English by John Bester, the book is a biography of one of the last traditional yakuza bosses in Japan. In the article published in the Journal, a line from "Floater" ("I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound") was traced to a line in the book, which said "I'm not as cool or forgiving as I might have sounded." Another line from "Floater" is "My old man, he's like some feudal lord". One line in the book's first chapter is, "My old man would sit there like a feudal lord." However, when informed of this, author Saga's reaction was one of having been honored rather than abused from Dylan's use of lines from his work.[49] Similarly, in defense of Dylan, Robert Christgau wrote: "All pop music is love and theft, and in 40 years of records whose sources have inspired volumes of scholastic exegesis, Dylan has never embraced that truth so warmly."[31]
Blood on the Tracks is the fifteenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on January 20, 1975, by Columbia Records. The album marked Dylan's return to Columbia Records after a two-album stint with Asylum Records. Dylan began recording the album in New York City in September 1974. In December, shortly before Columbia was due to release the album, Dylan abruptly re-recorded much of the material in a studio in Minneapolis. The final album contains five tracks recorded in New York and five from Minneapolis.
Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on August 30, 1965, by Columbia Records. Having until then recorded mostly acoustic music, Dylan used rock musicians as his backing band on every track of the album, except for the closing track, the 11-minute ballad "Desolation Row". Critics have focused on the innovative way Dylan combined driving, blues-based music with the subtlety of poetry to create songs that captured the political and cultural chaos of contemporary America. Author Michael Gray has argued that, in an important sense, the 1960s "started" with this album.
No Reason to Cry is the fourth solo studio album by Eric Clapton, released by RSO Records on 27 August 1976. The album was recorded in Malibu and Los Angeles between December 1975 to May 1976. The record went silver in the U.K.
Honkin' on Bobo is the fourteenth studio album by American rock band Aerosmith, released on March 30, 2004, by Columbia Records. The album includes 11 covers of blues and blues rock songs from the 1950s and 1960s, with one new song, "The Grind". The album pays tribute to Aerosmith's earliest influences and showcases a rawer sound when compared to their more recent commercial efforts. Honkin' on Bobo was produced by Jack Douglas, who was Aerosmith's producer on a vast majority of their 1970s output.
Infidels is the 22nd studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on October 27, 1983, by Columbia Records.
Bob Dylan at Budokan is a live album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released August 1978 on Columbia Records in Japan only, followed by a worldwide release in April 1979. It was recorded during his 1978 world tour and is composed mostly of the artist's "greatest hits". The performances in the album are radically altered from the originals, using the same musicians that played on Street-Legal, but relying on a much larger band and stronger use of brass and backing singers. In some respects the arrangements are more conventional than the original arrangements, for which the album was criticized. For a few critics, such as Janet Maslin of Rolling Stone, the differences between the older and newer arrangements had become less important.
Empire Burlesque is the 23rd studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on June 10, 1985 on Columbia Records. Self-produced, the album peaked at No. 33 in the U.S. and No. 11 in the UK.
Modern Times is the 32nd studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on August 29, 2006, by Columbia Records. The album was the third work in a string of albums by Dylan that garnered wide acclaim from critics. It continued its predecessors' tendencies toward blues, rockabilly and pre-rock balladry, and was self-produced by Dylan under the pseudonym "Jack Frost". Despite the acclaim, the album sparked some debate over its uncredited use of choruses and arrangements from older songs, as well as many lyrical lines taken from the work of 19th-century poet Henry Timrod.
"Someday Baby" is a Grammy Award-winning blues song written and performed by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released as the fifth track on his 2006 album Modern Times. The song had considerable success, garnering more airtime on U.S. radio than any other track on the album. It spent twenty weeks on Billboard's Adult Alternative Songs chart, peaking at #3 in November 2006. It was also anthologized on the compilation album Dylan in 2007.
"High Water " is a song written and performed by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released as the seventh track on his 31st studio album "Love and Theft" in 2001 and anthologized on the compilation album Dylan in 2007. Like much of Dylan's 21st century output, he produced the track himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost.
"Mississippi" is a medium-tempo country-rock song by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan that appears as the second track on his 2001 album Love and Theft. The song was originally recorded during the Time Out of Mind sessions, but was ultimately left off the album. Dylan rerecorded the song for Love and Theft in May 2001.
Together Through Life is the 33rd studio album by singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on April 28, 2009, by Columbia Records. The release of the album, which reached number 1 in multiple countries, was unexpected and surprised fans. Dylan co-wrote most of the songs with Robert Hunter and recorded with musicians including Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos. The album was recorded at Jackson Browne's Groove Masters studio in Santa Monica, California and produced by Dylan under the pseudonym Jack Frost.
Tempest is the 35th studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on September 10, 2012, by Columbia Records. The album was recorded at Jackson Browne's Groove Masters Studios in Santa Monica, California. Dylan wrote all of the songs himself with the exception of "Duquesne Whistle", which he co-wrote with longtime Grateful Dead associate Robert Hunter.
The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969–1971) is a compilation album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on August 27, 2013 on Legacy Records. The eighth installment of the ongoing Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, it consists of unreleased recordings, demo recordings, alternative takes mostly from Dylan's 1970 albums Self Portrait and New Morning, and two live tracks from the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival.
Shadows in the Night is the 36th studio album by Bob Dylan, released by Columbia Records on February 3, 2015. The album consists of covers of traditional pop standards made famous by Frank Sinatra, chosen by Dylan. Like most of his 21st century output, Dylan produced the album himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost.
The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 is a compilation album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on Legacy Records in November 2015. The tenth installment in the ongoing Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, it comprises recordings from 1965 and 1966, mostly unreleased demos and outtakes from recording sessions for his groundbreaking albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. The standard set peaked at #41 on the Billboard 200.
Triplicate is the 38th studio album by Bob Dylan, released by Columbia Records on March 31, 2017. As with most of Dylan's 21st century output, he produced the album himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost.
Rough and Rowdy Ways is the 39th studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on June 19, 2020, through Columbia Records. It is Dylan's first album of original songs since his 2012 album Tempest, following three releases – one of which was a triple album – that covered traditional pop standards. The album was recorded at Sound City Studios in January and February 2020. The session musicians included all of the then-current members of Dylan's Never Ending Tour band alongside other musicians, such as Blake Mills and Fiona Apple. The album's sound was described by critics as Americana, folk, blues, and rhythm and blues.
"Lonesome Day Blues" is a twelve-bar blues song written and performed by Bob Dylan that appears as the fifth song on his 2001 album Love and Theft. Like most of Dylan's 21st century output, he produced the song himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost.
"Moonlight" is a song written and performed by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in 2001 as the eighth track on his Love and Theft album. It is one of several songs on the album that nods to the pre-rock pop ballad genre. Like most of Dylan's 21st century output, he produced the song himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost.
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