David Gates on Bob Dylan

"Dylan is singing at least as strongly as on any recent album, and if he generally sounds like a Man of Sorrows, he revisits his old ironic edge on 'It's All Good,' and on 'My Wife's Home Town' he's got a folksy slyness we've never quite heard before, complete with a demonic chuckle. That song reprises Muddy Waters's 'I Just Want to Make Love to You' almost note for note, with David Hidalgo's accordion taking over Little Walter's original harmonica part. The accordion, in fact, colors 'Together Through Life' as decisively as Scarlet Rivera's violin colored the 1976 'Desire'; where she was fiery, he's appropriately world-weary. 'Together Through Life' grew out of its world-weariest song, the '30s-sounding Euro-café ballad 'Life Is Hard,' which Dylan wrote for a forthcoming film by the French director Olivier Dahan. How did Dylan get from there to the Americana of the rest of the album? Who knows? But it's usually his destination of choice. As on 'Modern Times,' he's appropriated the title of a country classic (here it's Dolly Parton's 'Jolene,' there it was Merle Haggard's 'Workin' Man Blues'); he's built another, 'If You Ever Go to Houston,' on a line from Leadbelly's 'Midnight Special'" ("Music," Newsweek, 4/27/09, p. 62).