Initial Thoughts on Dylan's "Together Through Life"

“What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time they were standing outside of them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat. What’s depressing today is that many young singers are trying to get inside the blues, forgetting that those older singers used them to get outside their troubles.” - Bob Dylan, from the liner notes to his second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

As Dylan expressed so simply and well back in the 60s the key to the blues, and maybe most all forms of art, is that they are infused with the Courage to Be. The Courage to Be is always the Courage to Be in spite of something – the anxiety of non-being or meaninglessness or guilt. Dylan has been the popular music master of this artistic courage.

What he does so effectively so often is to look the hardest and most depressing parts of being (or life) squarely in the face, sing about it, and therefore deny the victory of the anxieties with the very act of creating out of it. When you can sing about mortality and death with as much creativity and life as Dylan does in say, “Not Dark Yet” on his album Time Out of Mind, for a few minutes, at least, death loses much of its sting.

Dylan released his latest album of original songs, Together Through Life, on the 28th of April and the reviews have been mixed. Most reviews have been positive, but many have called the album “good, but no masterpiece” and a “letdown” after the last three albums. Dylan has an ongoing problem in reviews with always having to be compared with earlier selves. At one time the comparisons were always with the mid-sixties material. Then along came Blood on the Tracks and for years the greatest praise a Dylan album could get was “well, it is the best one since Blood on the Tracks.” Now, with the renaissance in Dylan’s reputation since the release of 1997’s Time Out of Mind he has yet another past Dylan to compete with. And this album has not only to compete with the memory of that album and 2001’s "Love and Theft" but in particular it is competing in memory with last year’s release of the splendid Tell Tale Signs a collection of outtakes from the last 17 to 18 years or so. That album contained several songs many considered “masterpieces” and its memory is very fresh in our minds as we listen to Together Through Life for the first time.

The general feeling among reviewers I’ve seen is that this is a much “lighter” less substantial album than Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft", and Modern Times. Many reviewers note that Dylan sounds like he is having a lot of fun on this one. And that, apparently for many, is a negative. It kind of reminds me of the girl in the movie “Don’t Look Back” who complains to Dylan that she likes his folk acoustic solo work better than what she is hearing on Bringing It All Back Home because it just sounds like he is having a “good old laugh.” Dylan replies to her “Well, don’t you like me to have a good old laugh once in a while? Isn’t that okay with you?”

It is okay with me. On Together Through Life Dylan literally cackles a few times. Written mostly in conjunction with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, the words are not as hard and bleak about life and love as the ones on those other records of the past decade or so, but they are hardly Pollyannaish. Dylan still puts the Courage to Be in spite of lost love, mortality, and corrupt politics on display, but there is a bit more light in this tunnel. The album is almost danceable and is infused with the accordion playing of David Hilgado from Los Lobos.

The opener is one of the best songs on the album “Beyond Here Lies Nothing.” It is not nearly as depressing as its title suggests – in fact the point seems to be that he is so in love with a woman that there is nothing worth having beyond their love. The catchy melody is highlighted by Hilgado’s accordion playing. “Life is Hard” has Dylan admitting that life is hard without a certain woman’s love. It is very slow, but also has a pretty melody with Bob's croaking voice straining for the notes. I could hear Norah Jones doing this one someday. Dylan borrows a melody from Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You” for his song telling us that Hell is “My Wife’s Home Town.” The first Dylan cackle of the album is at the end of this one. Being a transplanted Houstonian I get a kick out of “If You Ever Go to Houston” – a straightforward number. I haven’t warmed up to “Forgetful Heart” yet, but I love the Kafkaesque lines “The door has closed forevermore, if indeed there ever was a door.”

“Jolene” (no relation to the Dolly Parton song) is another blues rocker about a woman he can't live with or without and is followed by “This Dream of You” a ballad dominated by Hilgado’s accordion and a south of the border feel. It is the only song on the album Hunter had no part in. A hard rocking blues “Shake Shake Mama” follows and the opening lines “I get the blues for you baby when I look up at the sun/ I get the blues for you baby when I look up at the sun/ come back here we can have some real fun” set the tone for track.

Finally, Dylan brings on two of his best for last: “I Feel a Change Comin’ On” and “It’s All Good.” On the former it sounds like Dylan is falling in love, realizing it is late in life for it, but welcoming it nonetheless. “Well, life is for love” Dylan sings and you can actually believe him. Musically, it feels like a song by The Band for some reason. Dylan concludes the album with “It’s All Good” in which he presents a fast paced litany of modern evils and concludes each verse with a variation of “you know what they say…. They say it’s all good.” He is being sarcastic, of course, but the irony is that it is all good. Dylan cackles with delight – not at the misery he chronicles but at this banal modern phrase and the way he has used and subverted it. The way he has utilized it to do what the old blues singers did – to stand outside all the evil and suffering and to get himself (and us) outside his (and our) troubles. And there is nothing wrong with having a "good old laugh" now and then.

A few more thoughts on Gordon Kaufman’s “In Face of Mystery”

I posted a few days ago on my admiration for Gordon Kaufman’s reconstruction of Christianity in his In Face of Mystery. One of the (many) things I left out in that brief and over-simplified description was that his vision of Christianity is very nicely non-exclusivist. I have remarked before that for myself that is an important element of any religion I’m even considering being a part of.

What Kaufman basically says is that constructing a version of Christianity like this is a choice that one can make or not make. He notes that in fashioning this construction we make many choices along the way that one is free to accept or reject. The point is to construct something capable of orienting us within the world and our lives and he admits that there is more than one way to do that. So, he says, if you are interested in constructing a Christianity that is capable of fulfilling the purpose of orienting your life while maintaining continuity with traditional beliefs and capable of being fully integrated with a modern outlook on life and the world it is possible and here is one way of doing it. However, other Christians and other cultures also have ways of accomplishing this and it is inappropriate to say that if we choose this way we are choosing the ONLY way. We can learn from one another instead of trying to silence everyone who doesn’t choose the orientation we do.

For the modern highly culturally integrated world, this seems to be a must. One problem with it in practice, however, seems to me to be that no Christian church would suffer such a thing as official doctrine. Almost all denominations I know about declares the Bible, for instance, as THE word of God, or at least as uniquely inspired in some sense to the exclusion of all other expressions of the Mystery. That is why I have only felt at home with the Unitarian-Universalists. There, non-exclusivism is pretty much what the church (or fellowship) is all about. In the UU tradition the individual is encouraged to do just what Kaufman suggests – construct a theology that works for you and doesn’t exclude others. The disadvantage is that it is not really done as a fellowship so there is little shared experience for whatever theology you develop.

In any case I find very attractive the idea of developing your own theology within Christianity that is continuous with the traditions and with modern scientific thinking. I have admiration for Borg and Tillich and the like too, but Kaufman is the first Christian theologian I’ve read that I think actually achieves the merger with modern scientific thinking. With Tillich and Borg I think to myself “If Christianity had been presented to me like this, I might have never left the fold” but haven’t left there are still too many barriers with what they believe and with what I believe to be able to fully embrace their versions of Christianity now. Kaufman is the first theologian I’ve read and thought: “If there was a Christian denomination that adopted this, I could sign up tomorrow.”