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Wilfred Langmaid
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Bob Dylan: Together Through Life - Columbia/Sony Music

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There is something oddly liberating about learning for certain that you are engaging in an exercise in futility.

For the past 40 years I have tried to get a firm handle on the unique wisdom and genius of Bob Dylan. For nearly 30 years, I have tried to do that very thing on these pages.

Now comes Dylan's 33rd studio album Together Through Life. In the most basic sense, it is a far less lyrically intense and dense work than the acclaimed trilogy of comeback albums Time Out Of Mind (1997), Love And Theft (2001), and Modern Times (2006). Less than a year after last year's series of outtakes - the 3CD set Chronicles - he is back with a loose, limber album that nobody expected.

In the midst of a work that seems on the surface to be a simple album on generic themes of life and love light years removed from the deep and ponderous reflections of, especially, Time Out Of Mind and Love And Theft, Dylan offers the layer-filled lines "I keep my hands in my pocket, I'm moving along, people think they know, but they're all wrong."

That couplet is from Jolene, a blues shuffle that bears many of the album's distinguishing marks. It is a slow blues shuffle in that pre-rock vein of the mine that Dylan has made his perfect home at age 68. In that sense, Together Through Life is an extension of Modern Times.

Songs like Jolene, the Djando Reinhardt-meets 50s crooner piece Life Is Hard, the slinky tango-spiced album opener Beyond Here Lies Nothing, the Tex-Mex undercored country waltz This Dream Of You, roots country ramped up to a two-step in If You Ever Go To Houston, the straight blues romp My Wife's Home Town, and the 4/4 stomp (and very Modern Times-remniscent) Shake Shake Mama all predate in style every era of Dylan's own career of the past 48 years.

While some songs are steeped with melancholy and regret, this is never overwhelming. Just as often, the song's characters are happily pursing their romantic path. This time around, the lyrics have a lighter air overall. This is very likely rooted in his co-writing with Robert Hunter on eight of the 10 tracks - the most co-writing that Dylan has done on an album since he co-wrote seven out of nine tracks with Jacques Levy on the 1975 album Desire.

The sort of whimsy that marks many portions of the songs has Hunter written all over it. The statements on the world are there, as on the delightfully tongue in cheek album closer It's All Good. However, most of the attention of Together Through Life is given to living life with zest and to the search for love.

The album is intentionally underproduced - by Dylan himself. He is joined by his solid and able road band that has been with him since 2005 - the latest in a series of players that have been with him since his 100-or-so-shows-a-year life on the road became his life's path in the mid 1970s.

However, the leads are mainly taken by two guests - Tom Petty guitarist Mike Campbell and Los Lobos' David Hidalgo on accordion. Their signature licks help place this music in a road weary, but life-savouring, world of the past.

In particular, the Tex Mex accordion playing of Hidalgo quickly becomes this album's most distinct signature in the overall Dylan canon.

The backdrop gets the perfect lead strokes with Dylan's vocals. He has truly made his craggy bleat of a voice that really shredded in the late 70s into a powerful instrument - one that is ideally suited to the material and the style.

He even gives us his own way of describing the reality. In the soulful country roots rocker of love I Feel A Change Comin' On, he perfectly croaks "Some people tell me I got the blood of the land in my voice." He puts it perfectly.

The man who came in as a kid idolizing and emulating the living forebears of popular music, ended up revolutionizing rock music, and has weaved a career of unrivaled depth and scope has happily become one of its elder statesmen.

Rather than going gently into that good night, he is snarling his way through a career barreling forward as he stays in the very roots of his musical legacy.

At least, that's what I think. Dylan has spent a lifetime eluding analysis and expectation, so all we can say in the final analysis is the bottom line of his album closer, "You know what they say. It's all good."

Fredericton-based freelance writer Wilfred Langmaid has reviewed albums in The Daily Gleaner since 1981, and is a past judge for both the Junos and the East Coast Music Awards. His column appears each Saturday.