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What Is Bob Dylan Laughing At?Singing about love and loss, he still finds something to cackle about.

By John DickersonPosted Monday, April 27, 2009, at 5:41 PM ET

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Illustration by Charlie Powell. Bob Dylan has produced his first double-cackle record. In two different songs on Together Through Life, he rips out a little laugh at the end of a line. It's not a giggle or a jolly guffaw. It's a Vincent Price laugh. He's slipped something in your drink.

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It's easy to see why Dylan is having fun. The record is a raucous indulgence for a musician who likes to hopscotch across genres. He pays homage to Chicago blues in several songs, but then he slips into alt-country. Next, he sashays along to a haunting Gypsy violin. At one point he gets funky.

It's not a tedious indulgence. The playing is tight, and the songs are about a minute shorter than they have been on his last few records. He's backed by his tour band and Tom Petty's long-time guitarist, Mike Campbell. David Hidalgo from Los Lobos plays accordion throughout, staining each song the way the violin does on Desire. The feel fits Ani Difranco's definition of a record as explained in one of her songs: "A record of an event/ The event of people playing music in a room." It's raw and organic with lots of little winks, both lyrical and musical—a pedal steel one minute, a collection of tight little guitar riffs the next. Wait, is that a banjo? This record is not, as Dylan said of modern music, "people playing computers."

The music has a strong sense of place. The Chicago blues style sounds like the old Chess records, sure enough, but it also feels a little broken down. It's the sound you hear in those blues documentaries when some forgotten legend plays on his busted back porch. But Dylan doesn't stay in one place long. By the time you get to "If You Ever Go to Houston," you feel like you're in a cantina near the border.

The dirty guitar and accordion of the first track, "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'," would fit perfectly in the sweat and smoke of a dark roadside bar. That sound—minus the lonely trumpet—winds throughout the record along with the theme of love. For those who found "Beyond the Horizon" too schmaltzy on Dylan's last record, Modern Times, in which the distant country contains love (maybe even God's love), in this song, love is a more immediate and urgent break against uncertainty. "Don't know what I do without it/ Without this love we call ours/ Beyond here lies nothin'/ Nothing but the moon and stars."

Dylan says the new record has a "romantic edge." This is a tough, battered love—lost, out of reach, painful. Yet the voices in these songs are clutching at it. "Life Is Hard" is a crooning parlor ballad of a chilly and barren world of lost love. "Forgetful Heart" starts with a little banjo plucking, which suggests a lightness (Steve Martin said no song sounded sad when played on the banjo), but soon a dark minor blues guitar riff enters and everything gets bleak. The singer's heart is like a battered valise he carries even though it barely works any more. After trying to kick up pleasant memories of old devotions, he gives up and wonders if love was always just an illusion. "The door has closed forevermore/If indeed there ever was a door."

Dylan has written about love in all of its many forms, but there's a greater sense of flickering finality in these songs. It's a more specific form of the broader feeling of goodbye that's been creeping into his records since Time out of Mind. In "If You Ever Go to Houston" he's saying farewell, taking account. "Find the barrooms I got lost in/And send my memories home."