Jeff Davis | Vent Section Manager

In the early 1990s, Bob Dylan lost his voice. Several of you will argue that he didn’t have one to begin with, but I think even now his chords comfort me in a way no other voice can. His age-cracked tongue lulls lullabies in a whiskey- tinged muffler drone, simple and American. He is a poet more so than a musician. On “Love and Theft,” which may be his best album since “Blood On The Tracks,” this becomes stunningly clear.

On this, his 43rd (!!) album, Dylan takes the listener on a tour of Americana, leaving nothing out, including his own take on the blues. Pop the CD in to conjure images of Wrangler-jeaned men playing pool in a bar in the middle of nowhere, rusty cars rolling ragged down a deserted dirt road and fleabag hotels in Nevada with crummy mattresses. Just listen to “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.” The song slides into your ears the way “Tombstone Blues” did in 1965. There’s no mistaking a Bob Dylan album: the world is wrong, the women are crazy, but Bob always has his guitar and harmonica to document it all. And somehow, all that is wrong becomes right.

The album draws on many traditional American artists like Robert Johnson, Leadbelly and Big Joe Turner, creating an early-20th-century acoustic nostalgia- fest that echoes a sentiment found on the third track, “Summer Days.” “You can’t [repeat the past]. What do you mean you can’t? Of course you can." Saying it out loud while reading this article makes it sound terrible, but Dylan pulls it off, much like his quirky tale of a conversation with a woman on the “Time Out of Mind” track “Highlands.”

Another stand-out track on the album is “Po’ Boy,” which is a string of ironic knock-knock jokes. They seem ridiculous at first, but after a few listens they become frighteningly poignant.

I lent this album to Tim Poland, a professor in the English department. He came back to class with it a few days later, and said as he handed it back to me, “Jeff, my wife burned me a copy of this thing. I played the s*** out of it.”

Forget what you think you know about Bob Dylan. Again, this is his 43rd album, a status I strongly doubt present-day musicians will ever reach. An artist doesn’t produce this much five-star material (and play to nothing less than sell-out crowds) without doing something right. On “Love and Theft,” Dylan perfectly articulates bits and pieces of his musical journeys across each prism of American culture through the decades.

He may be 60 years old, but I’m convinced the soul of his music is a much loftier number.