"Love and Theft" is the 31st studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on September 11, 2001, by Columbia Records. It featured backing by his touring band of the time, with keyboardist Augie Meyers added for the sessions. It peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200, and has been certified Gold by the RIAA. A limited edition release included two bonus tracks on a separate disc recorded in the early 1960s, and two years later, on September 16, 2003, this album was remixed into 5.1 surround sound and became one of 15 Dylan titles reissued and remastered for SACD playback.
Background and recording
Love and Theft was the first album Dylan recorded with his Never Ending Tour road band. This is a trend that would continue with his subsequent eight studio albums. Guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell recalls Dylan showing him the chord changes for the new song “Po' Boy” shortly after the band had recorded Dylan's Oscar-winning original song "Things Have Changed" in 1999: “They were relatively sophisticated changes for a Bob Dylan song […] That was the first inkling of what the material might be like—taking elements from the jazz era and adding a folk sensibility to it".
David Kemper, Dylan's drummer at the time, described in an interview how the sound of Love and Theft arose from lessons the band had absorbed from Dylan: "I didn’t realise we were actually headed somewhere. I wasn’t smart enough to realise: you are in the School of Bob. But when we went in to record Love And Theft, I realised then, because the influences were really so old on that record. It comes from really early Americana, way back at the turn of the century, and the 1920s. And not everybody in the band was familiar with that style of playing. And I know that the songs that he would bring in would be these amazing examples of early Americana. Nobody that I know, knows as much about American music as Bob Dylan. He has spent so much time trying to understand, and collecting these songs—it was like a never stopping resource. He was always coming up with these songs or artists that I had never heard of. And then when we went in and recorded Love And Theft it was like, oh my God, he’s been teaching us this music—not literally these songs, but these styles. And as a band, we’re familiar with every one of these. That’s why we could cut a song a day […] and the album was done".
As Kemper indicated, the twelve songs on "Love and Theft" were recorded in just 12 days in May 2001 at Clinton Recording in Midtown Manhattan. The recording sessions were notable for their spontaneity. According to engineer Chris Shaw, “What surprised me was how quickly [Dylan] would abandon an arrangement when he was working. He’d say, ‘What’s the tempo? Let’s do it in F and drop the tempo down and do it like a Western swing tune, and I want the drummer to play brushes, not drums.’ And suddenly the song was completely different. Nothing was set in stone until he found that key, tempo and style that fit that vocal and that lyric”.
For his part, Dylan had been interested in working with Chris Shaw when he heard Shaw had gotten his start on Public Enemy's early records. Dylan praised Shaw's work as an engineer during a press conference in Rome to promote "Love and Theft" in 2001: After complaining that previous producers had botched the recording of his vocals, he was asked if he felt it was difficult to record his voice in the studio. Dylan referenced Shaw when he responded, "I don't think so […] On this particular record we had a young guy who understood how to do it." Dylan would subsequently employ Shaw to engineer and mix his albums Modern Times (2006) and Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) as well as various non-album tracks.
Content
The album continued Dylan's artistic comeback following 1997's Time Out of Mind and was given an even more enthusiastic reception. The title of the album was apparently inspired by historian Eric Lott's book Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, which was published in 1993. "Love and Theft becomes his Fables of the Reconstruction, to borrow an R.E.M. album title", writes Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune (published September 11, 2001), "the myths, mysteries and folklore of the South as a backdrop for one of the finest roots rock albums ever made".