Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#20 Bob Dylan, "LOVE AND THEFT"

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vs.

#109 Wu-Tang Clan, IRON FLAG

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To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [kentmbeeson@hey.com] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.

We have one Designated Cheerleader today, it’s for “LOVE AND THEFT,” and it’s another from Head Cheerleader @bsglaser.bsky.social! Take it away again, Brian!

In early 2000 I moved from Philadelphia to New York for a job at a dotcom startup. The benefits were good and included dental insurance, so I found a dentist near my office and started going for regular checkups and cleanings. The very first time, he found the first cavity I'd had in forever and filled it. Then he found something that needed fixing the next time, and every time, and I now realize this dentist needed to renovate his place in the Hamptons or something and was ripping me off.

The last ripoff was insisting that I needed some light surgery for receding gums. I scheduled the procedure for early evening of Monday, September 10, 2001, and told my manager that I might not make it to work the next day, depending on how much pain I was in. Plus, the next day there were primaries in the NYC mayoral election and, as all Tuesdays were at the time, September 11 was release day for a bunch of records, including the new Bob Dylan album, "LOVE AND THEFT," which was getting good reviews ahead of release. Maybe I'd pick it up.

Of course, all the record stores were closed that day. I eventually got my hands on "LOVE AND THEFT," but by then the context for hearing it had shifted radically. Was Dylan, so deeply associated with both New York City and American politics, a voice we needed to hear right now? And did he have anything to say to the NYC and America that his 31st studio album showed up in?

"LOVE AND THEFT" is not one of Dylan's political albums, and of course it's not a 9/11 record, despite the coincidental release date--but are there really any coincidences? It is Dylan's first album recorded with his road band of the moment, a quintet that was riding from town to town on the latest legs of the Never Ending Tour, a practice that he'd sustain throughout his 21st century work. And it's also one of Dylan's very best records, and all-timer that stands alongside (and maybe above?) his 60s and 70s peaks.

How could this be? The simple answer is that after a long while of wandering among trends and producers and guest musicians, Dylan settled into the version of himself that he lived with day to day and put that into the songs and the sounds. But it's also because he took the simple folk-song cataloguing of GOOD AS I BEEN TO YOU (1992) and WORD GONE WRONG (1993), slightly reconfigured the apocalyptic Americana of TIME OUT OF MIND (1997), and instead of looking forward turned his focus all the way back to the history of American music. "LOVE AND THEFT" is built on folk and blues and swing and country and cabaret and jazz and Tin Pan Alley and rock & roll (but NOT rock), with a title that alludes to the shameful history of minstrelsy and songs that dig through comedy and tragedy and love and theft and more.

This is also a record full of visions of water and rivers and floods; that it came out into a world on fire made the listening experience a bit of travel into a mirror world where the high water was rising instead of bombs falling. The days are summery or lonely, the nights are moonlit for dishonesty or crying a while. And "Mississippi," a song he'd tried to record a few times before, finally arrives as a late-era peak in Dylan's catalog, an epic that wanders through cities and small towns and out to sea and back. The emptiness, in Dylan's mythical Mississippi, is endless--and we've been there a day too long.

"LOVE AND THEFT" is satisfying from end to end. Dylan's road-tested band is on point and follows the leader in every direction. The frontline of Larry Campell and Charlie Sexton can sound modern and old-timey in turn or simultaneously, as needed. Bassist Tony Garnier, who is still on the road with Dylan and has evolved into sort of the musical director of the Never Ending Tour, holds things down and drives them forward. The melodies are familiar but not rip-offs. The lyrics are literary and full of ghosts, allusive and elusive, piling up images so you know exactly where you are but can never find the path all the way through or back.

Did Bob Dylan in 2001 reclaim his old glory or reinvent/reorient himself for a new century/millenium? I'd argue some version of the latter: Everything he's done from "LOVE AND THEFT" onward has been of a piece, a cohesive body of work that sounds like Dylan but not much like his old stuff. This is a pivot that happened to drop on the same day as a global inflection point, and it makes perfect sense in exactly the way the best Bob Dylan records do in times that are changing, uncertain, and moving along the road one song at a time.

Thank you, Brian!

Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.

Yesterday, #77 The Knife, THE KNIFE defeated #52 Old 97s, SATELLITE RIDES, 111-107-3. SATELLITE RIDES led for about 23 hours and 30 minutes, by anywhere from 14 to 9 votes. Then, with about a half hour left, THE KNIFE started gaining, and with about ten minutes left, the lead bounced back and forth between the two albums. (Had the match ended about four minutes earlier, SATELLITE RIDES would’ve triumphed.) But by the end, THE KNIFE took a solid lead and time ran out. Also, at one point, there were 4 abstentions, then a moment later, 3 abstentions and an extra vote for THE KNIFE. Nice to see someone get off the fence!

Thanks,

Kent