Bob Dylan (Columbia)
Together Through Life arrives on the back of the four-million-selling Modern Times, the semi-autobiography of Chronicles and Theme Time Radio Hour, the fabulous show he hosts for American satellite radio.
Album number 33, and Bob Dylan’s still on a roll.
This being Dylan, there’s a tendency to read too much into every note. Especially since, this time, he’s left most of the lyric-writing to former Grateful Dead collaborator Robert Hunter.
Perhaps as a result, the songs on Together Through Life are less allusive and mysterious than many in his catalogue; this is basically an album about love.
Whether the songs are particularly personal, to Hunter or Dylan, is neither here nor there.
The music? Sometimes lovely (the gently lilting Life Is Hard, the Latino-inflected This Dream Of You), sometimes dreary (Jolene and My Wife’s Home Town, a pair of plodding blues).
And on he rolls.
“You know what they say, man?” he asks on the closing track. “It’s all good.”
WILL FULFORD-JONES
