Dylan Gone Back to the Future with Alicia Keyes and Merle Haggard through "Modern Times"

There is something eerily calm about Dylan’s new masterpiece. And that’s what it is – a masterpiece. Beginning with “Time Out of Mind” Dylan revitalized his career with daring excellence, drilling his worldly knowledge and generations of practice into a body of carefully honed and crafted recordings. “Love and Theft” continued this excellence with an even better product. Released on Septemer 11, 2001, the album was seen as a prophecy, something not new to the old sage.

But it’s “Modern Times” and “Love and Theft” that are essentially linked – a late masterpiece followed by a just as equally strong opus. Unlike “Time,” these two albums are self-produced by the aged master and recorded live with his touring band in a very brief period of time. These last two albums also sound very similar in their usage of diverse old-time musical genres. The songs from both works also borrow affectionately from past inspirations.

About “Love and Theft,” Stephen Thomas Erlewine writes on allmusic.com:

Musically, Dylan hasn't been this natural or vital since he was with the Band, and even then, those records were never as relaxed and easy or even as hard-rocking as these. That alone would make Love and Theft a remarkable achievement, but they're supported by a tremendous set of songs that fully synthesize all the strands in his music, from the folksinger of the early '60s, through the absurdist storyteller of the mid-'60s, through the traditionalist of the early '70s, to the grizzled professional of the '90s. None of this is conscious, it's all natural.

Organic is how I hear it. Everything just blends together.

“Modern Times” builds on this experience as Dylan remains defiant in his use of old forms and petty sampling of American music history. For a man who was starkly criticized for ruining folk music by going electric in 1965, he is now more of an American folk artist than any acoustic-guitar-toting-coffee-bar-playing hipster could ever pray to emulate.

For an album with so many influences and references to the past, Dylan begins the album with a rather comic nod to R&B star, Alicia Keyes.

“"I was thinkin' 'bout Alicia Keys/Couldn't keep from cryin'/She was born in Hell's Kitchen and I was livin' down the line/I've been lookin' for her even clear through Tennessee."

That’s the last musical reference to anything remotely recent on this album that you’re going to find.

In “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” Dylan invokes Muddy Waters by not just replaying the old song, but giving it a Dylan makeover continuing the “love and theft” motif. The same goes for his own sequel to Merle Haggard’s “Workingman’s Blues” where he gives the original’s proletariat protagonist a more tender character based in this frighteningly cruel 21st Century.

Of course it’s Katrina that’s referenced in his reworking of Memphis Minnie’s “When the Levee Breaks” into “The Levee’s Gonna Break.”

In his August 20 New York Times review of the album, Jon Pareles also writes of Dylan’s natural appropriation of the past:

“There was a 19th-century song called ''Nettie Moore,'' about a slave sold away from the man who loved her. Mr. Dylan took its title and the first line of its chorus and also borrowed some lines made famous by Robert Johnson and W. C. Handy, surrounded them with his own images of separation and restlessness, and constructed an eccentric song; with alternating sections of 11 and 14 beats, its melody climbs painstakingly and then tumbles down. Mr. Dylan writes now as if American historical memory washes through his consciousness only to leave him more isolated.”

For me, the centerpiece of the album is “Ain’t Talkin’” – which actually concludes the album. The song is a sardonic growl held over a gentle shuffle and Dylan remains steadfastly unforgiving of the world he is pondering much like he was in “Rainy Day Woman #12 and 35.”

“The whole world is filled with speculation/ The whole wide world which people say is round/ They will tear your mind from contemplation/ They will jump on your misfortune when you’re down”

Upon hearing the title of this album about a month ago, the first thing I thought of was Paul Simon’s even, listless tenor gliding over Brian Eno’s techno-like beats. I was only more than gleeful to be greeted instead by “Love and Theft”’s more somber brother.

I think Slate’s Jody Rosen said it best in his review of the album:

Modern Times will amply reward the solitary Dylanologist, poring over its runes for clues to the eternal mystery of Bob and the universe. But this is an album best experienced with a loved one; I hate to break it to Justin Timberlake, but a wheezy old man has recorded the best make-out songs of 2006. Put Modern Times in the CD player, pull your sweetheart close, and—as a young man advised a lifetime or so ago—shut the light, shut the shade.

Ah, modern times, indeed.