One of Bob Dylan's Most Low Key, Organic LPs Is Hiding in Plain Sight
Sure, it was more approachable than it ever was groundbreaking – but, so late in the game, that was its own form of artistic bravery.
Commissioned to do some soundtrack work, Bob Dylan kept recording with the assembled group and ultimately produced an LP that was strikingly approachable. Together Through Life, released this month in 2009, didn’t change anybody’s mind about Dylan. It feels largely forgotten today.
But it was a revelation in its stubborn unwillingness to move into the realm of Statements, or Big Records, or Career-Defining Blah Blah Blah. Dylan wanted to make a small, good thing. So he focused inward, mostly, talking about relationships with both honesty and a ragged sense of humor. He brilliantly succeeded.
Highlights included “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’” and “My Wife’s Hometown,” both of which sound like shambling leftovers from Dylan’s sessions in New Orleans with Daniel Lanois – complete with surprising syncopation, biting guitar (courtesy of Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers fame), lyrical assists from Robert Hunter and fun, braying vocals.
“She can ... make things bad, she can make things worse. She’s got stuff more potent than a gypsy curse,” he sings on “My Wife’s Hometown,” with a sly wink. “One of these days, I’ll end up on the run. I’m pretty sure she’ll make me kill someone.” Only later did we learn that his spouse resides in Hell.
The loping “If You Ever Go to Houston” – “you’d better walk right!,” Bob Dylan crooned – was a playful bit of songcraft, too, made complete with this swaying accordion contribution by David Hildago of Los Lobos. “This Dream of You,” in what amounts to a mariachi mash note, was as sweet as it was charming.
There was an intimacy, and a fun musical feel, about the appropriately titled Together Through Life that’s reminiscent of a bottle-passing night of music amongst old friends. It was a welcome return to the kind of collaborative successes he found with Daniel Lanois on Oh Mercy and, earlier, with the Band on Planet Waves.
Sure, the organic Together Through Life was more pleasing than it was groundbreaking. But that, too, seems brave for someone carrying around the expectations associated with being Bob Dylan. All of the world’s problems, after all, wither under the glare of an angry woman: “State gone broke, the county’s dry,” Dylan sings, “Don’t be lookin’ at me with that evil eye!”
He was having fun. And pretty soon, you were too, as Dylan scooted and flirted (no kidding) through a rocker called “Shake Shake Mama.”
He still explores darker emotions on the bluesy “Forgetful Heart” – memorable for a funky, misshapen solo by Campbell at its middle – then opens himself to tender vulnerability on cuts like “Life is Hard,” an almost slow-motion moment of nostalgia. Dylan’s bare-seamed late-career singing is particularly effective on the latter, bringing a broken dignity to a lyric about lost love.
Then Dylan brushes off a lifetime of incessant examination and overthunk interpretations with the Cajun-spiced “It’s All Good”: “Brick by brick they tear you down. ... You oughta know, if they could they would,” Dylan sings. “I wouldn’t change it even if I could. You know what they say: It’s all good.”
By turns both chummily tuneful, pungent and toss-off hilarious, Bob Dylan’s unforced Through Life Together was most unlike what your average legend would ever dare be: Real.
Amazon best-selling rock band biographer Nick DeRiso is at work on a new book titled ‘Forever Young: How the Band and Bob Dylan Made the Only ’60s Music That Still Matters.’ Find out more at www.nickderiso.com.