| "Love and Theft" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||
| Studio album by | ||||
| Released | September 11, 2001 (2001-09-11) | |||
| Recorded | May 2001 | |||
| Studio | Clinton Recording, New York City | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 57:25 | |||
| Label | Columbia | |||
| Producer | Jack Frost (Bob Dylan's pseudonym) | |||
| Bob Dylan chronology | ||||
| ||||
"Love and Theft" is the thirty-first studio album by American singer-songwriterBob Dylan, released on September 11, 2001, byColumbia Records. It featured backing by his touring band of the time, with keyboardistAugie Meyers added for thesessions. It peaked at No. 5 on theBillboard 200, and has been certifiedGold by theRIAA. The album's highest chart positions worldwide were in Norway and Sweden, where it peaked at No. 1, giving Dylan his first No. 1 album in Norway sinceInfidels, and his first No. 1 album ever in Sweden.[5] A limited edition release included a separatedisc with twobonus tracks recorded in the early 1960s, and two years later, on September 16, 2003, this album was remixed into 5.1surround sound and became one of 15 Dylan titles reissued andremastered forSACD playback.
"Love and Theft" was the first album Dylan recorded with hisNever Ending Tour road band. This is a trend that would continue with his subsequent eight studio albums. Guitarist/multi-instrumentalistLarry Campbell recalls Dylan showing him the chord changes for the new song "Po' Boy" shortly after the band had recorded Dylan'sOscar-winning original and non-album 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 inMidtown 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 onPublic 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 albumsModern Times (2006) andRough and Rowdy Ways (2020) as well as various non-album tracks.
The album continued Dylan's artistic comeback following 1997'sTime Out of Mind and was given an even more enthusiastic reception. The title of the album was apparently inspired by historianEric Lott's bookLove & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, which was published in 1993. "Love and Theft becomes hisFables of the Reconstruction, to borrow anR.E.M. album title", writesGreg Kot in theChicago Tribune (published September 11, 2001), "the myths, mysteries and folklore of the South as a backdrop for one of the finestroots 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 inJohn 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'sAnthology of American Folk Music, the pre-rock voicings ofHank Williams [Sr.],Charley Patton andJohnnie Ray, among others, and the ultradry humor ofGroucho Marx.
Offered the song by Dylan,Sheryl Crow later recorded an up-tempo cover of "Mississippi" for herThe Globe Sessions, released in 1998, before Dylan revisited it for"Love and Theft". Subsequently, theDixie Chicks made it a mainstay of theirTop of the World,Vote for Change, andAccidents & Accusations Tours.
As music criticTim 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 (forCharley 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 aRolling Stone interview withMikal Gilmore, Dylan himself summarized the album's themes as dealing with "business, politics and war, and maybe love interest on the side".[12]
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 byKinka Usher, shows Dylan in a tense poker game with magicianRicky Jay, actressFrancine York andDharma & Greg writerEddie 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 number of interviews with press to promote the album. On July 23, 2001, he participated in a press conference at the Hotel de la Ville inRome[14] with reporters from Austria, Britain, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.[15] He was also interviewed byEdna Gundersen forUSA Today,[16]Robert Hilburn for theLos Angeles Times[17] andMikal Gilmore forRolling Stone.[18] All of these interviews appeared shortly before or shortly after the album's release on September 11, 2001.
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 photographerDavid Gahr. Mazur also took the album's inside cover photo of Dylan and the"Love and Theft" band (including organistAugie Meyers). The album's art direction is credited to Geoff Gans.[19]
| Aggregate scores | |
|---|---|
| Source | Rating |
| Metacritic | 93/100[20] |
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   [21] |
| Blender | [22] |
| Chicago Sun-Times | [23] |
| Entertainment Weekly | A−[24] |
| The Guardian |  [25] |
| Los Angeles Times | [26] |
| Q | [27] |
| Rolling Stone | [28] |
| Spin | 9/10[29] |
| The Village Voice | A+[30] |
The album won theGrammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album at the44th Annual Grammy Awards. It was nominated for Album of the Year and the track "Honest with Me" was nominated forBest Male Rock Vocal Performance.
In a glowing review for his "Consumer Guide" column published byThe Village Voice,Robert Christgau wrote: "IfTime Out of Mind was his death album—it wasn't, but you know how people talk—this is his immortality album".[30] Later, whenThe Village Voice conducted its annualPazz & Jop critics' poll,"Love and Theft" topped the list, the third Dylan album to accomplish this.[31][32] It also toppedRolling Stone's list.[33]Q listed"Love and Theft" as one of the best 50 albums of 2001.[34]Kludge ranked it at number eight on their list of best albums of 2001.[35]
In 2003, the album was ranked number 467 onRolling 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.[36]Newsweek magazine pronounced it the second best album of its decade.[37] In 2009,Glide Magazine ranked it as the No. 1 Album of the Decade.[38]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".[39]
In a 2020 list of "Bob Dylan's 10 greatest albums" inFar 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".[40] A 2020 article at theUltimate 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".[41] 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".[42] Ian O'Riordan, in a 2021 article in theIrish Times, ranked the album sixth out of the 39, praisingDavid Kemper's drumming and citing "Lonesome Day Blues" as his favourite track.[43]
Johnny Cash, in a 2001 interview withThe New York Times, named it as Dylan's best album.[44]
Critic Jake Cole, in a 2021Spectrum 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 laudedRolling 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".[45]
"Love and Theft" generated controversy when some similarities between the album's lyrics and Japanese writerJunichi Saga's bookConfessions of a Yakuza were pointed out.[46][47][48] Translated to English byJohn Bester, the book is a biography of one of the last traditionalyakuza bosses in Japan. In the article published in theJournal, 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."[30]
All tracks are written byBob Dylan.
| No. | Title | Recorded | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" | May 8, 2001 | 4:46 |
| 2. | "Mississippi" | May 21, 2001 | 5:21 |
| 3. | "Summer Days" | May 8, 2001 | 4:52 |
| 4. | "Bye and Bye" | May 12, 2001 | 3:16 |
| 5. | "Lonesome Day Blues" | May 11, 2001 | 6:05 |
| 6. | "Floater (Too Much to Ask)" | May 12, 2001 | 5:00 |
| 7. | "High Water (For Charley Patton)" | May 17, 2001 | 4:04 |
| 8. | "Moonlight" | May 16, 2001 | 3:23 |
| 9. | "Honest with Me" | May 9, 2001 | 5:50 |
| 10. | "Po' Boy" | May 16, 2001 | 3:04 |
| 11. | "Cry a While" | May 18, 2001 | 5:04 |
| 12. | "Sugar Baby" | May 19, 2001 | 6:40 |
| Total length: | 57:25 | ||
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | "I Was Young When I Left Home" (Recorded December 22, 1961) | 5:24 |
| 2. | "The Times They Are a-Changin'" (Alternate version, recorded October 23, 1963[50]) | 2:56 |
| Total length: | 8:20 65:45 | |
Weekly charts[edit]
| Year-end charts[edit]
|
| Region | Certification | Certified units/sales |
|---|---|---|
| New Zealand (RMNZ)[75] | Gold | 7,500^ |
| Sweden (GLF)[76] | Gold | 40,000^ |
| Switzerland (IFPI Switzerland)[77] | Gold | 20,000^ |
| United Kingdom (BPI)[78] | Gold | 100,000^ |
| United States (RIAA)[80] | Gold | 757,000[79] |
^ Shipments figures based on certification alone. | ||
