Was it somehow 1964 again? In May 2001, Bob Dylan—without a producer, but with the trusty band he’d built for his Never Ending Tour—entered a studio in New York and left with an album after only 12 days. Only four months later, that record, “Love and Theft”, arrived on September 11, 2001. Rather than getting lost amid the world-altering currents of the day, the album once again turned Dylan into a voice of reason, spotting catastrophe on the horizon and leveling with it. “Well, today has been a sad and lonesome day,” he sang rather uncannily at the start of a growling blues, repeating the line for good measure. “I’m just sitting here thinking/My mind a million miles away.” Though “Love and Theft” would never entirely escape the context of its release date, this is the record in which Dylan begins to have fun again—where he sounds like he’s thrilled to be in the studio, leading a band of his design and dreams, as he sings about Shakespeare, boxing, and booty calls. On the road, Dylan had been teaching his band about the atavistic music of the United States, revealing blues, country, and jazz sounds that were nearly a century old. By the time they arrived in the studio, they were steeped in the stuff, and the joy they find in it is obvious: the woozy organ shuffle of “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum”; the ghoulish backwoods swagger of “High Water (For Charley Patton)”; the balladic drift of “Moonlight.” If the intense Time Out of Mind sessions in 1997 had been about discovery, these were about delivery. To wit, the mighty band down in Miami had struggled with “Mississippi,” a gorgeous reckoning with existential upheaval, as Lanois insisted it sounded too old-fashioned; in New York, Dylan’s road band offered it up as a creeping country epic, no apologies. And on Time Out of Mind, Dylan had wallowed. But here, digging deep into the sounds he loved, he started to talk back to whoever had—or wanted to—hurt him. He is practically sadistic over the slicing groove of “Cry a While,” telling someone he’d tried to help and love to get lost. “I’m gonna buy me a barrel of whiskey/I’ll die before I turn senile,” he snaps, saying in no uncertain terms he’s got better things to do. He’s a bit more somber about the circumstances on the seven-minute closer, “Sugar Baby,” rendering his goodbye with the solemnity of a classic crooner. But Dylan had found a new phase of his career, and he had better things to do than waste his time on some corrupted love or wicked scoundrel.