What's most striking about the record is that it is such a collaborative effort. Dylan works as closely with these musicians and singers --
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among them, violinist Scarlet Rivera, bassist Rob Stoner and drummer Howard Wyeth of the Rolling Thunder crew, and vocalists Emmylou Harris and Ronee Blakley -- as he has with anyone since the Band. But it's still Dylan's album. Had the group been given a chance to record with more care, the record could have been the blockbuster the songs deserve.
In addition to working with a band again, Dylan is collaborating on lyrics with Jacques Levy (who cowrote "Chestnut Mare," among others, with Roger McGuinn), and Dylan's longtime Columbia Records associate, Don DeVito, has stepped into a full-fledged production role (although he is given only a halfhearted credit).
DeVito's role is crucial. Although he wasn't able to get Dylan to work with the musical discipline that's been missing from all of his records since he left the Nashville studio pros, DeVito did get a sound that's a considerable improvement on the fuzzy Blood on the Tracks or the seemingly unmixed Planet Waves. Fuller instrumentation might even have overwhelmed the technical flaws. As it is, the drum sound adds a power akin to rock & roll on almost every song, and the droning effect of the voices set against Rivera's violin is so seductive that it can make you forget that what's being played is often fairly boring.
It's not altogether clear just what Jacques Levy contributed to the songs. In many ways, they are of a piece with Dylan's other work. But the humor that has been missing since John Wesley Harding is in great abundance here ("Isis" might be an outtake from JWH) and the imagery is the most strikingly well-developed since New Morning. On the other hand, the rhyme schemes are just as tortured as ever: Mozambique may very well rhyme with cheek-to-cheek, speak and peek, but then there's "put his ass in stir" and "triple murder" in "Hurricane."
But it's hardest to determine who is responsible for the most meaningful change in Dylan's writing, which is expressed in the songs concerning women. Previously, Dylan has recognized only two kinds of women: "angels," whose function was to save man (from the women themselves as often as not), and "bitches," whose function was to let him down, if not by overt attempts to ruin and confuse, at least by their failure to save. The bitches enjoyed their heyday during the "Just like a Woman" period, of course, and their prominent return on Blood on the Tracks was one of the principle reasons why that album was believed to be a return to the golden age. The angels dominated from Nashville Skyline to Plan
