Bob Dylan's Big Bad Love: It's All Good!

Aside from featuring the same photo on their covers, I don't know if there's any deliberate connection between Together Through Life, Bob Dylan's new album, and Larry Brown's 1990 short story collection Big Bad Love (movie adaptation, 2001). I do know Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill published all but one of Brown's books, and I missed meeting him by less than a year. By that time, I'd moved on from Algonquin to Duke's Perkins Library in Durham. Sadly, Brown died in 2004 at the age of fifty-three. Dylan, on the other hand, at almost sixty-eight is still going strong and wild.



The two tracks that've grabbed me so far from Together Through Life are the opener, "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'," and the closer, "It's All Good." These are definite hits right off the bat. (Indeed, the album as a whole hit number one recently around these parts). I'll be happy with keeping these two on the old iPod, for sure. I've found that among other things, several of Dylan's tracks from recent albums are perfect for running on the treadmill to.

For a taste, one might check out YouTube or sample the downloads. "It's All Good" is a saucy number wherein Dylan lays out a litany of disasters followed by his brutally sardonic subversion of its cliché-title. As for the album's title, for all I know, it may be Dylan's wry acknowledgement that his music is, to use another cliché, part of the permanent soundtrack of his listeners' lives.

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.