At some point- damned if I know where- Bob Dylan became a character in his own music. On Modern Times, he was a gambler, a hobo, a miner, sailor, and a million other illustrations of Americana along the way- and he was drunk the entire time.
Together Through Life contains twice as much fiction and three times as much booze. The characters which somehow make up Dylan's psyche are all here, having a party that everyone's invited to- he's a drunken blues-man putting on some kind of revue on “My Wife's Home Town,” (which is “Hell,” by the way); he's a former sharp-shooter in “If You Ever Go to Houston,” and he even manages to sound like an old, rich pervert trying to take home a 17-year old girl in “Shake Shake Mama.” Only once on the album does Dylan really sound like he's not playing a part- the sardonic closer “It's All Good,” where he growls the title phrase of the song- and I can't tell if he's serious, sarcastic, or completely disgusted. Vagueness is one of Dylan's fortes.
Dylan's music has always been filled with characters, so the thing that makes Life so different from Modern Times lies in sound and attitude. Life is much less serious than anything Dylan's recorded since his renaissance began (in '97, with Time Out of Mind). Some of the bluesiest songs contain unpolished music, rough around the edges, like it was recorded on a runaway train barreling through a tunnel after two rehearsals (“Beyond Here Lies Nothin',” “My Wife's Home Town,” “Jolene”), but that's the point. And the lyrics on those songs only sound like throwaway lyrics. Blues is, ultimately, music about gut feeling, and Dylan's got it here in excess- the slut that charmed away his money on Modern Times has come back, beat him up, killed his dog, and burned his house down. And he turns it all into a sub-melodic growl that sounds like its coming from the dead love-child of Vincent Price and James Earl Jones.
Dylan's been singing blues for years (listen to Blonde on Blonde, from '66, if you doubt me), but its been refined so much along the way that now, finally, the man is a blues artist, more than he's even been before. And thank the gods that he and his fans seem to have accepted it, because the last decade has seen not only a renaissance for Dylan, but a complete resurgence (remember that Modern Times held the number one spot on Billboard for a time); after nearly 50 years, Bob Dylan remains one of the finest songwriters in the world.
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