2009: Together Through Life - Bob Dylan
Looking back at 30 years of music | Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan has written and released some of the most ambitious, important and revolutionary songs and albums in the modern cannon. In the 60s he changed the face and direction of popular music, and has returned time and again since with excellent, challenging and groundbreaking new works. This is the man who released Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Blood on the Tracks and Slow Train Coming. Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind; Love and Theft, Modern Times, Tempest, Shadows in the Night and Rough and Rowdy Ways.
Of course, not every album is, or could possibly be, out on such a stratospheric level. Some of his records have been releases that only a fan could love (here’s looking at you Self Portrait, Knocked Out Loaded and Down in the Groove).
Then there are those that sit somewhere in between. Albums where Dylan had nothing to prove but was still driven to create. Where he gets to fade into the band a little. Play a little looser, sing a little easier and write a little lighter. I love hearing him in this mode, where he gets to stretch out a little and have some fun in the studio. When the stakes are lower, where the air is lighter and there is less tension in the music. On albums like Nashville Skyline, New Morning, Under the Red Sky and, of course, Together Through Life.
Each of these are still creative endeavours where Dylan was changing direction or trying something new from the release that came before, but he is exploring new sounds on these releases without trying to revolutionise them.
Dylan can be an incredibly complex artist at times. He has plenty of word-heavy songs with long run-times and intricate rhyme schemes; songs that tell sprawling and cinematic stories full of illusion, disillusion, full of myriad characters, unreliable narrators and tenses or times. But sometimes he favours a more subtle approach. A simple rhyme telling a simple story in a simpler song.
This simplicity and brevity is something that Nashville Skyline, New Morning, Under the Red Sky and Together Through Life have in common. In fact, Together Through Life is the only album of original material that Dylan has released since Under the Red Sky in 1990 which doesn’t have any songs over 6 minutes (three of the other five originals albums released in that time period even have songs that go over ten or fifteen minutes).
Modern Times, directly before Together Through Life, is full of rich but dense poetry. It is brimming with literary references, illusions and borrowings. It has songs which deal with the political landscape as well as themes of love and loss, human connection and disconnection, history and the future. It is a big-picture album, whereas Together Through Life is more zoomed in; concerned with the smaller aspects and stories which make up those big pictures.
The great thing about Dylan is that he is just as effective a songwriter when he is writing simplistically as when he is writing something grander. Maybe even more so. Take I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight or If Not For You, for example. Both are incredibly simple in their message, structure, form and delivery and yet both are incredibly moving and impactful. This album is full of lyrics like those where Dylan gets something profound across in an an almost shockingly simple way.
This Dream of You
There's a moment when
All old things become new again
But that moment might have come and gone
All I have and all I know
Is this dream of you which keeps me living on
Forgetful Heart
Forgetful heart
Lost your power of recall
Every little detail
You don't remember at all
The times we knew
Who would remember better than you?
I Feel a Change Comin’ On
Well, life is for love
And they say that love is blind
If you wanna live easy
Baby, pack your clothes with mine
It is not just in the lyrics, either - Dylan also sounds much more laid back in his performance here, too.
He’s having fun on this record. He cracks up laughing at the end of My Wife’s Home Town. There is a smile in his voice all through If You Ever Go To Houston and the riotous album closer It’s All Good. In one moment on that last track, George Receli’s train-track rhythm drum-beat builds up such a head of steam in tandem with Donnie Herron’s insistent steel guitar part that Dylan lets out an exhilarated “woo!”. With all the age evident in his cracked and busted-up voice, never on a record has anyone sounded simultaneously so old and so youthful as Dylan does in this moment.
Some people have used the more simplistic lyrics, slighter songs and less ambitious arrangements as reasons to write the album off. When you have made albums like Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks or Time Out of Mind, anything would seem minor in comparison, but sometimes an album can be great without striving for greatness. Because of the heights that Dylan has reached, the expectation on him is always raised, but not every album has to be bigger to be better.
Dylan clearly takes his work and his art incredibly seriously, but thankfully he does not take himself too seriously. He, like everyone else, wants to have fun. He, like everyone else, loves to let loose and play, crack a joke and crack up laughing. He is having a blast on this album, and, when you listen to it for what it is, and not for what you think a Bob Dylan record should be, it’s hard not to have a blast with it as well.
Another thing this album has in common with New Morning is that the songs were originally supposed to be written for a visual medium; not with a new record in mind.
New Morning started out life when Dylan was approached by poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish to write songs for the musical Scratch. Whilst most of the songs never made it to stage, the process inspired Dylan to keep on writing and eventually turn out the quietly wonderful New Morning (for my money, Sign on the Window is one of his best ever songs and performances and, of course, The Man in Me is a pure delight).
Together Through Life, meanwhile, was conceived after Dylan was approached by the French director Olivier Dahan.
Dahan asked Dylan to supply a soundtrack for his new film My Own Love Song. As with New Morning, Dylan didn’t turn out a full batch of songs for the project but one did make it into the movie, when Renée Zellweger’s character Jane sings a version of Life is Hard.
Musically, Together Through Life is not a million miles away from the rest of Dylan’s late-career output. The Blues are still the blueprint here, but there is a twist on this release. It still sounds like we’re in Chicago after dark, but the record also takes us south of the border.
Joining (most of) Dylan’s regular road band on the record is a member of Los Lobos. David Hidalgo’s accordion playing is all over the album, and he supplements the rest of Dylan’s usual suspects with new elements of light and shade. Also along for the ride is Heartbreaker Mike Campbell, who is as good a guitarist as Dylan has ever played with and who gets plenty of room across the songs to show it.
The album kicks off with the thundering Beyond Here Lies Nothin’. With Dylan sounding more gnarled and grizzled than he ever had on record before, his band create a beautiful and chaotic swirl of blues, funky southern rock and latin rhythms behind him that sounds part Black Magic Woman and part pure black magic.
It’s relatively rare for Dylan to let his guitarists off the leash, but this song owes as much to the lead guitar work as it does to the accordion, or to George Receli’s always excellent drumming, or indeed Dylan’s voice. Adding extra layers and depth to the sound here are Donnie Herron’s trumpet and Dylan’s own swells on the organ. This musical palette entirely suits his rough-around-the-edges voice, and is as lean and mean as he sounds. The song sounds huge, with so much going on, and is one of his strongest album openers for years.
Life is Hard is a much more tender affair; Dylan strains at the upper limits of his register to croon this lovers lament. His main accompaniment comes from Donnie Herron’s weeping steel-guitar and Mike Campbell’s mandolin work. The lyric is about as Tin Pan Alley as Dylan ever got, and wouldn’t be out of place next to the songs of Cy Coleman or Irving Berlin which populated his upcoming Songbook releases.
Musically, My Wife’s Hometown is so closely based on Willie Dixon’s I Just Want to Make Love to You that Dixon even received a co-write credit for the track. For the most part, the lyrics sound like they are made up of floating blues verses but Dylan is so steeped in the tradition that he has a knack for writing things that sound like they should have come from a hundred years before they actually did.
This is one of the best examples of how Dylan was utilising all the cracks and croaks in his voice around this time period. Considering how he has been singing for the last ten years, he was clearly leaning in to the rougher edges of his voice on Together Through Life (and later, Tempest) as a creative choice and his wolf-man growl so perfectly suits his devilish wit on My Wife’s Hometown.
If You Ever Go To Houston is a fun workout. Dylan’s organ, Hidalgo’s accordion and Herron’s steel-guitar all combine to pull the song along with an insistent two-tone top line while the drums shuffle underneath, and bass and acoustic guitars add a little colour throughout. Dylan’s voice is relatively buried in the mix; he is not on top of the music here like most vocals would be, but rather, he is mixed right inside it.
There are some funny lines in the song and a few inventive rhymes (Austin / lost in) in this lesson in how to stay on the right side of the law in the border countries.
On the album, Forgetful Heart is a gritty, muddy dirge. It sounds a little like what’s going on under the hood of Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ (and, the final lines are saying much the same thing: “the door has closed forever more, if indeed there ever was a door”) but the song took on a whole new life when it made it to the stage.
A blend of over-driven guitar and organ on the record, in live performance this song was slowed down to a funereal tempo. Tony Garnier would move to the upright bass and, played with a bowed string, his deep and resonant anchoring of the song would pierce you to the bone. Dylan punctured each harshly crooned verse with a high, lilting and lasting harmonica solo and gave the song a gravitas and reverence that on returning to the record you find is missing.
Jolene is a shuffle of the kind that Dylan and his group could churn out without breaking a sweat. There’s half a very good song here, but the cooler lyrics and deliveries and guitar parts are let down by a few lazy lines and rhymes that with just a little more polish could have made for a much better song.
This Dream of You is another lilting love song, a companion piece to Life is Hard, full of wonderful and evocative writing; some of the very best on the album. Donnie Herron once again shows off his versatility, this time supplementing Dylan’s yearning lyrics and vocals with a violin line that floats around Hidalgo’s accordion and tugs on the heart-strings as much as any of the words can or do.
Am I too blind to see
Is my heart playing tricks on me?
I'm lost in the crowd, all my tears are gone
All I have and all I know
Is this dream of you which keeps me living on
From one of the softest moments on the record, Dylan and his band launch into one of the most swaggering. Shake Shake Mama is a raucous, garage blues. Dylan is again leaning into the darkest elements of his voice and bounces around the excellent drum work and guitar interplay from his band. With the energy, life and confidence in this track, it doesn’t matter that some of the lyrics are as light as they were in Jolene - Dylan sells them with so much more confidence here that he can get away with it.
The penultimate track is one of my favourites on the album. A ballad of hope and love like Life is Hard and This Dream of You, I Feel a Change Comin’ On is more uptempo and upbeat than those two. This is a ballad that isn’t directly informed by the blues, but is more in line with the singer-songwriter mode of tracks that Dylan himself pioneered.
He elongates every vowel here and emphasises every word, so it is ironic that he chooses this song, where he is doing some of his best singing on the album, to drop in a lyric about what people think of the state of his voice with the line “some people they tell me, I’ve got the blood of the land in my voice” (it’s not just the blood of the land, either, he has the whole history of American music in it, too; later on in the song he morphs into Louis Armstrong as he delivers the line “everybody got all the money, everybody got all beautiful clothes / everybody got all the flowers, I don’t have one single rose").
The song is full of delightful, playful and thoughtful lyrics and it’s carried along on a bed of soulful southern guitar playing and bounces around on a steady Receli beat. Alongside all of those delightful, playful and thoughtful lyrics, though, is one of Dylan’s most uproarious and outlandish, which is delivered with a straight face but a wink in the eye
You are as whoreish as ever
Baby, you could start a fire
I must be losing my mind
You're the object of my desire
It’s All Good brings the album to an end with a one-chord romp where Dylan and His Band let loose and sign off with a good laugh, and a lot of fun.
Some people complain about this album, but there are no bad songs, bad playing or performances on it. Put it on and give it a listen. It’s all good.
Although I have seen Dylan live almost 50 times, I have only actually seen him play two songs from Together Through Life. Whilst most of the tracks on this album did get regular airings on the tours directly following the release of the album (Life is Hard and Shake Shake Mama are the only two still awaiting their debuts) only Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ really stayed in the set as the years went by. Dylan even dusted it off as recently as this year, for a one-off performance on the first night of the Outlaw Tour.
Here is a short except from my book - which, alongside this newsletter, is of course named after the album - about the rendition of Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ from the final night of Dylan’s London Palladium residency in 2017 (easily one of the greatest Dylan shows I have ever seen).
Chaos reigns between each verse. Dylan hammers the piano like a man possessed and the band stay in step with him the whole way. The bedlam continues into Beyond Here Lies Nothin’; the border-town rhythm holding place as the band shuffle through the verses, but, as Dylan’s ascending piano line leads them into the instrumental breaks it feels as though every instrument is playing its own song, somehow keeping it together despite walking such a tightrope.
For the final break, the song modulates and all hell breaks loose. The chaos is overwhelming. It feels like Dylan and His Band have opened a portal to another world where anything goes.
This wasn’t the only album that Dylan released that year. Remember Christmas in the Heart? Of course you do, it’s the best Christmas album there is!
Last December, Ray Padgett put out a great interview with Christmas in the Heart backing vocalist Randy Crenshaw about the making of that record, which you can find below.
If it feels wrong to read about a Christmas album in the middle of summer, imagine what it felt like to make one then!
Notable Album Releases:
Arctic Monkeys - Humbug
Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career
Florence + the Machine - Lungs
Green Day - 21st Century Breakdown
Japandroids - Post-Nothing
Lady Gaga - The Fame Monster
Paramore - Brand New Eyes
Rihanna - Rated R
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It’s Blitz!
The xx - xx
Bonus release:
Wilco - Wilco (The Album)
Despite the fact that Dylan always gets the most clicks and likes on this newsletter when I write about him, this is the last time he’s going to headline a post for a while. I started out writing these posts in the first place as an excuse to write about artists other than Dylan, so whilst I won’t be able to resist getting something about Tempest in the 2012 post, or Shadows in the Night in 2015, he’s not going to be the main focus again until 2020 and Rough and Rowdy Ways.
We’ve got some fun stuff coming between now and then, though! Stay tuned for Paul McCartney and Courtney Barnett, Leonard Cohen and Taylor Swift and, next up, I think, maybe…Rihanna. I’m not sure. 2010 looks like slim pickings for something I like enough to write about so we’ll see.
This was a great piece, making me feel I was too hard on this album, although it was definitely one of the best of the year (although not in the top 10. I attribute the lyrical laziness to Robert Hunter, so it would have been interesting to look into the origins and effects of that collaboration. As for other albums from 2009, here’s my Top 10, which only includes the Arctics for your list: http://anearful.blogspot.com/2009/12/blog-is-born-best-of-2009.html?m=1
Great insights on Together Through Life! The laidbackness (at least lyrically, considering the sound is harder than Modern Times), the Tex-Mex influences including from David Hidalgo's contributions, and references to Bob's live performances help to augment the reflection. I will say a reference or several to Robert Hunter would have been apropos, as you highlight the lyrical simplicity so much and this was a rare Dylan album that was almost completely co-written, in this case with Grateful Dead songwriter Robert Hunter.