For many Bob Dylan fans, Modern Times, released next week, is his most anticipated album since 1974, writes Tony Clayton-Lea
Bob Dylan has swapped prolificacy for quality. As the decades have passed, so the need to flood the market with sub-standard material has dried up. Dylan appears to have learned the most important marketing lesson of them all: keep the supply to a minimum and people will feel they need the product all the more and that the product itself is of better quality. Thing is, when Dylan's product is as good as it has been for the past 10 years, you're left feeling, well, why isn't there more where this came from?
Dylan's latest creative resurgence started in the mid-1990s. Following two of the worst albums of his career (1992's Good as I Been to You and 1993's World Gone Wrong), stop-gap product (1995's Unplugged and 1997's Best Of . . .) paved the way for a new record, Time out of Mind. Released in October 1997, it arrived soon after a widely publicised and near-fatal bout of pericarditis (inflammation around the heart caused, in Dylan's case, by a fungal infection). When the album came out, it was widely thought that its themes of inadequacy and death (or at least the shadow of it) were brought about by the songwriter's sepulchral soul-searching. But no, he said, the record was completed before the health scare. The songs? Well, the songs were him just trying to walk within the parameters of despondency and hope. "I'm suited to walk that line," he told the Los Angeles Times, "right between the fire."
Time out of Mind came after a particularly inconsistent phase of Dylan's recording career. The traditional acoustic albums, Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, had fooled all but the most devoted of Dylan fans. The signs for the new album were good, however, including the fact that its producer was Daniel Lanois, who had previously overseen the singer's very good 1989 record, Oh Mercy. But it was the strength of the songs that knocked aside the bad years, the dreadful material, the schizophrenic stage shows.
Here, at long last, was a Dylan record that was strong and true; no obfuscation, no games, just songs of import and intensity, of humour and honesty. They were songs that finally overcame what Mojo magazine recently described as "the overbearing difficulty of the task he had set himself: artistic renaissance when the resonance of the back catalogue he sang nightly must have mocked his continuing inability to write new songs of comparable stature".
Four years later - with the cushion of Time out of Mind tucked behind him - it might have seemed reasonable (and not at all surprising) that the follow-up record, Love and Theft, would revert to the other Dylan: a patchwork of mediocre songs with a track or two suitable for sporadic radio play. Not a bit of it. Love and Theft (released in the US on September 11th 2001) carried on where Time out of Mind left off, connecting directly into that record's pithy themes of ageing and the gradual realisation that the pearly gates would soon be opened.
Apparently, Dylan was well and truly finished with allegory, something confirmed by Chronicles Volume One (2004), the admirably cogent first section of his autobiography. "Up close and personal" seemed to be his new creed, further underpinned by last year's Martin Scorsese documentary, No Direction Home, and this year's XM satellite syndicated radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour. He has so far refused to back down from this stance and his forthcoming album, Modern Times, indicates the strength of his resolve.
For some of his fans, it is his most anticipated album since 1974's Blood on the Tracks. With two excellent albums right behind him, the potential (and pressure) for a creative hat-trick is immense. The album is being pitched by Dylan's record company, Sony/Columbia, as the third of a trilogy, and it's right in many ways, as Modern Times falls in line behind Time out of Mind and Love and Theft as an extension of themes, lyrically and musically.
Of its 10 songs, four (When the Deal Goes Down, Workingman's Blues #2, Nettie Moore and Ain't Talkin') are rock-solid classics, each destined to stand alongside Dylan's greatest (if not most commercially successful) moments. These songs prove that he continues not to want to cruise on reputation alone and that his pursuit of honesty through the medium of rock'n'roll is as audaciously committed as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.
It's interesting, of course, that the 65-year-old outsider songwriter still feels the need to express himself so clearly on certain topics (not so simple twists of fate in the area of love being but one of them). Modern Times is his third album in little less than 10 years, so it's reasonably safe to say there won't be many more original studio albums released by the time he's 70; indeed, at the going rate, we'll have just the one.
Perhaps Dylan feels time is too short to mess around any more. He writes in Chronicles: "Many times I'd come near the stage before a show and would catch myself thinking that I wasn't keeping my word with myself - you have to deliver the goods, not waste your time and everyone else's."
Perhaps, in emulation of his longstanding hero, Woody Guthrie, he finally came to the realisation in the mid-1990s that any subsequent original songs could only stand the test of time if they contained the sweep of humanity (or something close to it), songs that you could listen to and songs that you could learn from.
• Modern Times is released next weekend on Sony/Columbia. It is reviewed in The Ticket next Friday