It seems like a lifetime ago that a Chaplinesque scamp established the audacity of his songwriting vision with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Flash forward 43 years, and Dylan has never sounded more freewheeling than he does on his new album with the Chaplinesque title Modern Times. Produced by Dylan (as Jack Frost) and featuring the latest edition of his crack road band — with Stu Kimball and Texas legend Denny Freeman replacing the dual guitars of Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton — the album is both the most playfully sexual and profoundly spiritual from Dylan in decades.
What’s particularly vital is how those two elements are frequently as intertwined in Dylan’s music as the strains of blues, folk, country, and rock ‘n’ roll which fuse into an original style that is both timeless and all-American. The Chuck Berry-esque romp through the opening “Thunder On The Mountain” combines visions of eternity with wet dreams of Alicia Keys, in almost six minutes of rapture that finds the sacred within the sensual. Likewise, the stately waltz of “When The Deal Goes Down” could as easily be a prayer (“We all wear the same thorny crown”) as a love song, though the interpretation isn’t necessarily either/or. Just as the lilt of “Beyond The Horizon” could be Dylan’s “Over The Rainbow” or his most tender hymn, conjuring an eternity where “Love waits forever, for one and for all.”
Much (perhaps too much) has been made of Dylan’s borrowings from a wide variety of sources for both this album and its predecessor, Love And Theft, opening the question of just what “original” means to America’s most influentially original songwriter. From the outset, he has appropriated a tune from here, a phrase from there, a Bible verse, a nursery rhyme. Whatever he has channeled from a Civil War poet, I doubt Dylan expected anyone to believe he “composed” “Rollin’ And Tumblin'” out of thin air, with its arrangement so familiar from the bumblebee guitar sting of the Muddy Waters signature tune (which Muddy likely appropriated from someone else).
Yet the prophetic sneer of the song’s declaration that “Sooner or later, you too shall burn” takes the familiar into territory Muddy never imagined, just as the album as a whole ups the creative ante for Dylan’s most impressive run since Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde. He recorded those in little more than a year, but the creative resurgence that began with 1997’s Time Out Of Mind has stretched these three albums over almost a decade. It takes longer when you get older.
