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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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Most of the lyrics were co-written with Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist, and they come off far better than their previous collaboration, which produced two forgettable songs on the 1988 album Down in the Groove. The only song Dylan wrote himself is "This Dream of You." It's another deeply atmospheric song with the drifty feel of "Romance in Durango" or "Mozambique." Dylan sits in a world of shadows, in "curtain gloom," clinging to the dream of a lost love in a fleeting world where everything he touches or looks at disappears. The dream sustains him, but if it came true, you get the sense it would disappear as he touched it. Tough spot.

But come back in off the ledge. It's not all bleak. "Shake Shake Mama" is a spontaneous, boogying, uncomplicated love song. So is "Jolene," where Dylan sings, "If you hold me in your arms things don't look so dark." She's got powerful medicine. She can "make a dead man rise and holler 'she's the one.' " The upbeat "I Feel a Change Comin' On" has a little echo of Motown, including a sunnier view of love, which Dylan makes intimate and easygoing: "If you wanna live easy/ Baby pack your clothes with mine."

"My Wife's Home Town" is a blues-in-D lark complete with familiar references to "gypsy curse" and "evil eye." Sure, it's about the burden of lust, but it's just too fun to make anyone worry about much of anything. It's such a copy of Willie Dixon's "I Just Wanna Make Love to You" that Dylan gives him a songwriting credit (though Dylan's sounds more like Muddy Water's version of the song). That's one of the cackle songs. The other is "It's All Good," a fiercely ironic destruction of the phrase that includes the menagerie of characters—corrupt politicians, a cold blooded killer, widows and orphans—that have populated Dylan songs for decades.

Finally, we must come to the battered business of Dylan's voice. It's the mess you'd expect but maybe even a little more banged up and stomped on since the last record. Sometimes it sounds like he's lugging it over his shoulder, other times he bullfrogs a line or two, and sometimes it's so rusty I want to mail him a can of WD-40. Fans trade messages on Dylan sites trying to puzzle out what he's up to. Was he saying she's "porous" or "whorish"? That would make a difference on the Valentine's card. (He's saying the latter and it's a compliment.) It's worth puzzling out because the trail of Dylan's influences can be fun to follow. At various points he nods to Sun Tzu, Shakespeare, and Chaucer.

The confusion even reigns over an interpretation of a lyric about his voice. Does he have the "blood of the lamb in my voice," as one reviewer guessed, or is it "the blood of the land"? Is he returning to his Christian roots or just his roots? It's the latter, and Dylan's voice, like that lyric, makes a kind of sideways sense. The voice tracks with the rough texture of the composition: It's imperfect, clumpy, and cracked from drought, but it works. And, after all, Howlin' Wolf's voice was once compared to "the sound of heavy machinery operating on a gravel road."

In "Song to Woody," on his first record, Bob Dylan wrote to his idol Woody Guthrie that it would be presumptuous to pretend he'd been "hittin' some hard travelin' too." It was a tribute but also part of Dylan's eager yearning to do exactly that—to have the earned wisdom of having traveled down endless streets and avenues. He is that guy now. He's lived that life and he's reveling in it, even the brutal parts. Maybe that's where the cackle comes from.