MOG

My version of Bob Dylan's "Love & Theft" starts off with "Things Have Changed." I decided one day that, much as I loved the album, I wasn't happy with the way it started, so I shuffled some music around and made Dylan's earlier song from the "Wonder Boys" soundtrack Track One, like how "Like A Rolling Stone" is the earlier single that leads off "Highway 61 Revisted."

So now the album begins, for me, with Dylan in a strip club ("There's a woman on my lap and she's drinking champagne," he sings, and I guess this could be taking place in his living room, but it probably isn't). Then, after anticipating the apocalypse ("Any minute now I'm expecting all hell to break loose"), he delivers the song's message:

"People are crazy and times are strange/I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range/I used to care, but things have changed."

I've played "Love & Theft" more than any Dylan album since "Blood On The Tracks." It speaks to my condition vividly, with humor and fatalism and confusion. I don't want to make too much of my quixotic addition of a new first track, but it seems to me that now the album is rightly and poetically bookended. It starts with this:

"I hurt easy, I just don't show it/You can hurt someone and not even know it"

And ends with this, from "Sugar Baby":

"Every minute of existence seems like some dirty trick/Happiness can come suddenly and leave just as quick/Any minute of the day the bubble could burst/Try to make things better for someone, sometimes, you just end up making it a thousand times worse"

"Love & Theft" came out on 9/11/01, and I remember people going on about how it eerily caught the trembling chaos of those days, but I'd had the album for a while before that, and had already been playing the CD on repeat. I was living in a sublet on Bleecker Street, the personal future unclear, and a great Dylan album was the right thing for my mood, even prior to downtown being engulfed by smoke and stench. I was selfish enough to read Dylan's album ("There ain't no limit to the amount of trouble women bring") as medicine. Even the jaunty blues "Summer Days" seemed to have something to say to me:

"Where do you come from? Where do you go?
Sorry that's nothin' you would need to know
Well, my back has been to the wall for so long, it seems like it's stuck
Why don't you break my heart one more time just for good luck"

On the subway last night, "Things Have Changed" came on my iPod. Do you know how many amazing one-liners are packed into this one song? "I"ve been trying to get as far away from myself as I can," "I'm in love with a woman who don't even appeal to me." Even a quote from "A Streetcar Named Desire." Even though it won an Oscar, because it isn't on a "proper" Dylan album, it's been kind of a homeless song, but I think I've put it in its proper place.