Columbia to Release Bob Dylan's Love and Theft; Artist's First Album in Four Years Hits Stores September 11.

Entertainment Editors

NEW YORK--(ENTERTAINMENT WIRE)--July 16, 2001

Columbia Records will release Bob Dylan's first new album in four years, Love And Theft, on September 11. The album, the artist's 43rd, features 12 brand-new Bob Dylan compositions recorded this spring with Bob Dylan's touring band, augmented with other musicians including legendary Texas keyboard player Augie Myers.

Song titles on Love and Theft include "Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum," "Mississippi," "Summer Days," "Bye And Bye," "Lonesome Day Blues," "Floater," "Highwater (For Charlie Patton)," "Moonlight," "Honest With Me," "Po' Boy," "Cry Awhile," and "Sugar Baby."

As USA Today's Edna Gundersen wrote about Love And Theft in today's edition, "Dylan's 43rd album exudes the breezy confidence of a veteran and the adventurous energy of a budding prodigy." She went on to say, "Love And Theft finds pop's inscrutable iconoclast breaking new ground while simultaneously mining gloried traditions in American song....The result is contemporary yet rootsy, and an unexpected left turn from the million-selling Time Out Of Mind."

In today's Los Angeles Times, pop music critic Robert Hilburn described the album as "filled with an energy and imagination of its own - almost as if he wanted to revisit some of the classic pop, folk and rock musical textures he heard on the radio as a youngster in Minnesota. But he has reworked them into striking contemporary pieces, filled with his trademark level of dazzling lyric sophistication."

Hilburn summed up the album's tone by writing, "It is a unique mix of party frenzy and serious reflection."

Bob Dylan commented about the new album to U.S.A. Today, "All the songs are variations on the 12-bar theme and blues-based melodies. The music here is an electronic grid, the lyrics being the sub-structure that holds it all together.

"The songs themselves don't have any genetic history. Is it like Time Out Of Mind, or Oh Mercy, or Blood On The Tracks, or whatever? Probably not. I think of it more as a greatest hits album, Volume 1 or Volume 2. Without the hits; not yet, anyway."

Columbia Records President Don Ienner believes the timing is perfect for a new Bob Dylan album, "Love And Theft is an album for the masses, not just for the core Bob Dylan fans. There are a lot of people who aren't being served by much of the music that they hear today, and this is the kind of record that people are hungry for. Bob Dylan is a one-of-a-kind artist making one-of-a-kind music and Love And Theft proves it again."

The release of Love and Theft marks another milestone in the career of one of the world's most extraordinary artists, and comes amidst one of Bob Dylan's most creative and prolific periods. In only four years since 1997's release of the platinum Time Out Of Mind -- one of the artist's biggest-selling and most critically acclaimed albums, and for which he received three Grammy Awards, including Album Of The Year -- Bob Dylan has performed nearly 450 concerts around the world. He also wrote and recorded "Things Have Changed," featured in the film Wonderboys, for which he received both the Academy Award and Golden Globe earlier this year.