Word: albums
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...power of a sunset, the only suspense the shock you feel when it suddenly slips away, casting strawberry light on the outline of distant clouds. It is now apparent that there has been a narrative arc to Dylan's career. He started obvious, then exploded surreal--each new album a surprise of some sort--and is now back to being obvious again...
...began as a tribute act: Woody Guthrie reinvented, down to the studio photos in which he pooched his lips like Woody and held his guitar the same way. On his first, eponymous album, Dylan sang mostly other people's songs--except for one talking blues and the haunting "Song to Woody," which was an exercise in folk classicism. He wrote new lyrics to the tune of Guthrie's "1913 Massacre," just as Guthrie had applied his lyrics to the ancient ballads he'd learned from his mother...
There followed one of the most amazing explosions of creativity in the history of songwriting, a three-album epiphany--Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966)--in which cascades of surrealistic, high-art lyrics were married to the most elegant rock-'n'-roll musicianship. That was brought to a violent stop by Dylan's near fatal motorcycle crash in 1966, and when he resumed, the music--even the sound of his voice--was different...
...Each new album became an exploration--he went country, he went bluesy, he became a Christian, he re-became a Jew. His mature work of genius, Blood on the Tracks, came out of nowhere in 1975. There were other albums that were not so good--but it was all fascinating, all infused with Dylan's lacerating intelligence. If it stuck in your head like a toothache, the dentist was also providing some dreamy nitrous oxide...
...still true, even now, with Together Through Life. It will not go down among his best albums, but the music is good, and the mood is poignant to the point of intoxication, the wheezy nostalgia anchored by David Hidalgo's magnificent accordion work. Dylan can still get frisky, as he does with the last track on the album, "It's All Good," in which the banality of that expression is demolished in escalating scenes of horror...