Together Through Life
| Bob Dylan
Together Through Life
Together Through Life is the 33rd studio album by singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on April 28, 2009, by Columbia Records. The album debuted at number 1 in several countries, including the U.S.[and the UK. It was Dylan's first chart-topping album in Britain since New Morning in 1970. Dylan wrote all but one of the album's songs with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, with whom he had previously co-written two songs on his 1988 album Down in the Groove. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Dylan commented on the collaboration: Hunter is an old buddy, we could probably write a hundred songs together if we thought it was important or the right reasons were there... He's got a way with words and I do too. We both write a different type of song than what passes today for songwriting. The only other writer Dylan has ever collaborated with to such a degree is Jacques Levy, with whom he wrote most of the songs on Desire in 1976.-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Rolling Stone
But Dylan, who turns 68 in May, has never sounded as ravaged, pissed off and lusty, all at once, as he does on Together Through Life.
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Pitchfork
Dylan again sounds like a one-man preservation society, exploring popular song traditions that halted around the release of his own first record in 1962.
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The Guardian
It serves all that prating about how nothing can match the 60s to suggest one of that era's heroes is still operating with his powers undiminished. But the reality is less exciting, as Together Through Life - neither masterpiece nor disaster - proves.
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Paste Magazine
Together Through Life finds Dylan less focused on greeting the Reaper than fighting him off a while longer; the better to savor the fruits, both bitter and sweet, that life has left to offer. The album . . . lays down a ferociously swinging groove while Dylan implies that, aside from the love that exists here and now, there’s “nothin’ but the mountains of the past.”
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BBC Music
Ultimately it's another masterful reading of 20th century American folk, albeit shot through with some mischievous lyrical twists.
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Consequence of Sound
This record is a glimpse into a mind where love signifies pain as much as euphoria, cruelty as much as sweetness, and longing as much as satisfaction. Together Through Life is a good Dylan album and nothing more.
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AV Club Music
For all the pain and peril of the lyrics, there’s a lot of sly humor, too, underlined by the album’s loose, joyful sound. Working with his touring band plus Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo and Tom Petty guitarist Mike Campbell, Dylan wraps the songs in arrangements that look back through the decades without owing allegiance to any particular roots.
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Pop Matters
He’s clearly enjoying himself on Together Through Life, his gleeful honk of a voice driving each number, from the smoky, plodding “My Wife’s Home Town” to the spry closer “It’s All Good”.
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The Austin Chronicle
Together Through Life's thick Southern drawl croaks romantic disillusion instead of literal "High Water (for Charley Patton)" blues from 2001's raw, decade-best revitalization, Love and Theft.
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Slant Magazine
Together Through Life continues the guitar solos, with David Hidalgo of Los Lobos and the Heartbreakers’s Mike Campbell helping to make up Dylan’s best backing band in decades, but where are the quotables?
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Mojo's four-Star Review
. . . Together Through Life is an album that gets its hooks in early and refuses to let go. It’s dark yet comforting, with a big tough sound, booming slightly like a band grooving at a soundcheck in an empty theatre. And at its heart there is a haunting refrain. Because above everything this is a record about love, its absence and its remembrance.
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The Washington Post
if the aptly titled "Together Through Life" turns out to be the last album that America's most important song poet records, its mix of inscrutability, flashed teeth, existential angst, deep sorrow, deadpan humor and dead-on takedowns would make it a perfectly satisfactory coda to a remarkable half-century of musicmaking.
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All Music
Dylan's not just aware of the modern-day vernacular, he's wound up with an album that fits the spirit of 2009: it's troubled but hopeful, firmly in favor of love and romance, but if that fails there are always romantic dreams and sardonic jokes to get you through life.
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The Telegraph
Dylan is the greatest poet songwriter of the modern era. In his 68th year (on his 33rd studio album) we continue to pay revenant attention, even though he wheezes and croaks, offers up Tin Pan Alley rhymes and oft-used melodies. Together Through Life is a beautifully played collection of antique blues pop.
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Pop Matters
If older artists have a tendency to look backward and most young ‘uns to aim grasp at the future, Dylan’s gift has been to make hay of those distinctions and set himself apart from either generational trend. Together Through Life is reliable, steady, willing to give if you’re willing to receive.
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All About Jazz
Together Through Life is definitely a high point and ranks with his very best. In a way, perfection and art don't really collide, but they do communicate and Dylan is, without question, an artist in the true sense of the word. Real art remains even when fashion changes. Beyond that lies nothing.
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Pop Dose
The vocals on Together Through Life are the best I’ve heard on a Dylan album in quite some time. It seems that his voice has settled into this nice raspy, deep groove.
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Uncut
A glorious, ramshackle rag-bag stuffed with good times, black humour and great swathes of accordion.
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Record Collector Magazine
Together Through Life might not be the most enduring Dylan album of them all but, yes, it is all good and, in embracing his libido along with his age (there’s no escaping the weathered voice), it’s a more successful, believeable celebration of living forever young than the likes of Mick Jagger could ever muster.
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Spectrum Culture
As this decade comes to a close, Dylan, like us, is taking his time to examine not only the last 10 years, but the entire history of rock ‘n’ roll. While Dylan’s voice has opened up to become not only an intrinsic part of musical history, he has also adapted the role of living curator of a time and place almost erased by those who care more about the trappings of stardom than the roots of music.
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Music OMH
Together Through Life is one of those mundane albums. It marries unremarkable 12-bar blues with lyrics that appear to have been composed on the back of a fag packet, and seems deliberately positioned to break no new ground whatever. And yet it’s wholly competent in its familiarity; slick, even.
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The Green Man Review
Together Through Life isn’t the same as Modern Times (and thank God for that), but it’s just as good in its own way. I’d almost say it’s apples and oranges, but Together Through Life is really somewhat of a companion piece to the earlier album, still exploring the old blues vibe, but this time with more of a Southern Cal/Tex-Mex border influence (much of that courtesy of Los Lobos’ David Hildago on accordion and guitar, and Donny Herron’s trumpet).
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WXPN World Cafe
With thirty-three studio albums now to his credit, Bob Dylan continues to offer songs with the richness and depth to which we've all been accustomed. His latest album, Together Through Life is a 10 song collection, a majority of which were co-written with Robert Hunter and self-produced by Dylan, under his alter-ego Jack Frost.
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No Ripcord
While there is a distinctly bordertown feeling to these songs, mainly due to Hidalgo’s presence, we still find our hero mining the past for inspiration. Whether it’s the Chess blues, Marty Robbins or Sam Cooke records, he’s sticking with what he knows and loves and musically it continues to work for him. For those of us who love the simple, unpretentious traditional forms, Dylan is now the keeper of the flame.
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Countdown Kid
When it arrived in 2009, Bob Dylan’s Together Through Life was met with almost universal praise from reviewers (yours truly included, I must admit.) And yet…. The album, which features Dylan co-writing with Robert Hunter and getting instrumental support from Heartbreaker Mike Campbell and accordionist David Hidalgo, hasn’t blossomed with the passing of time like other late-period Dylan albums tend to do
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Drowned In Sound
That at 68 years old (a staggering 33 studio albums, bestselling autobiography and successful radio show in) he finds himself atop both the UK and US album charts with Together Through Life is food for thought indeed. “Some people, they tell me I’ve got the blood of the land in my voice”, he croons here, weathered and worldly-wise as ever. It might not be a perfect record, but it’s nevertheless a remarkable one.
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Stuff
But this, Together Through Life, is dull. It sounds like some old coot sitting around in a retirement home with a whole bunch of other elderly souls knocking out some tunes. It’s not musically objectionable in any way. The windows do not rattle, the doors stay on their hinges and it just moves along. It's like shopping mall music - something to hear in the distance while sipping a latte before hitting the supermarket.
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National Public Radio
A lot of the songs here are both intense and possessed by an effort to make everything seemed tossed-off and spontaneous. Dylan avoids irony on every song but "It's All Good," which is pretty much all bad. The rest of the time, though, Dylan convinces you that his heart still throbs ardently for lovers past and present, and that it's making music about that ardent passion that keeps his steady, unending labor rewarding — for him and for us, together through life.
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Spin
Together Through Life resides in that sepia-toned world; the biggest flourish is the omnipresent accordion, courtesy of Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo, which only adds to the air of dusty antiquity. . . . Having long since traded abstraction for irascibility and wistfulness, Dylan still offers flashes of black humor (“Hell is my wife’s hometown”) over the ten songs, but the fatalism that’s marked much of his recent work is in short supply.
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The LA Times Music Blog
. . . "Together Through Life" was recorded with cronies including Tom Petty's longtime guitarist Mike Campbell and Los Lobos co-founder David Hidalgo, whose Creole-Latino accordion playing sets the mood throughout. Dylan's lyrics employ the old blues technique of finding the soul in the jellyroll -- using tales of love and sex to get to deeper matters of mortal bondage and spiritual transcendence.
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Entertainment.ie
Unfortunately, his 33rd album 'Together Through Life' tempers the congenial nature of its predecessor in the worst way possible. What originally began as a one-song project for a film soundtrack should probably have stayed that way; although the musicianship displayed here is undoubtedly satisfactory, there's absolutely no spark whatsoever
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Tone Audio
Sure, his voice is a bit more gravely since Modern Times, but this record really swings and it sounds great.
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Wicked Local Wellesley
On “Together Through Life,” Dylan adds Los Lobos’ accordion player David Hidalgo to his current touring and recording band, creating the sound of a juke joint on the Texas/Mexico border and continuing his late-career streak of excellently bluesy Americana records.
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Spex
The album – by a long way the most nervously anticipated by fans and press so far this year – turns out to be a surprising and entirely well-rounded record, with a marked Mexican/Cajun influence. It sounds like a summer album, full of longing for the American South and a time that is lost forever.
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Bob Dylan-Visions of Dylan
The album is much breezier than his previous album, “Modern Times,” which does not mean it is better per say, but it is just as compelling and all the while, a curious listen. This is an album to cherish as if listening to someone who is a master (and yet also a life-long student) of his trade.
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Holland Sentinel
This, his 33rd studio album, is a fine chronicle of his career and life so far. All of the musical influences he has collected along the way are present and accounted from blues, zydeco, folk, country, and rock and roll. Similarly, his penchant for exploring, life, love, spirituality, along with is own mortality shape this cd into a singular work that can stand alongside any of his previous efforts.
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The Beat Patrol
This one leans hard on ready-made blues in the citified-country-ways style of Chess Records, particularly the kingpin swagger of Waters and Wolf, but Dylan loots all kinds of vintage sounds, rambling through Django Reinhardt guitar jazz (“Life Is Hard”), Mexicali country waltzes (“This Dream of You”) and decadent cafe tango (“Beyond Here Lies Nothing”).
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Belfast Telegraph
The music is firmly within Dylan's comfort zone, but with that voice “of sand and glue” — as David Bowie so memorably opined — as rich as ever, it hardly seems to matter.
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Magnet Magazine
Together Through Life is perfectly fine, a lazy and charming record, full of old licks, mostly borrowed and blue, befitting an old man who’s done everything.
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The Current
Together Through Life is the exception that proves the rule: a musically and lyrically bland collection of songs on ancient themes that gain no new resonance on this competent but completely unexceptional outing.
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NME
As a result of the spontaneous nature of its inception, ‘Together Through Life’ sounds loose and informal, and you get the impression that its creator had a lot of fun making it. A shame, then, that it’s not quite as much fun to listen to.
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Guitar Player
This is a solid, bluesy album with lots of inspired bluesy guitar-picking numbers.
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JamBase
. . . Together comes off more on par with the likes of Dylan’s mid-level classics like 1974’s Planet Waves, 1978’s Street Legal or 1983’s Infidels. It’s an album you might not immediately recognize as a Dylan masterstroke but one that will certainly grow into your rotation in the same way those aforementioned understated gems.
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The Daily Record
Sonically, the album is cut from the same cloth that has defined Dylan’s previous ‘00’s offerings. It is a pastiche of Chess blues, Sun Records country and rock and pre-war pop.
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Rock Times
"Together Through Life" - a title that could easily be placed in the soft-pop charts of any number of decades ... Was not a tricksmarter, eagerly producing Jack Frost in the devilish detail. Each of these Frost outputs has - still - the incomparable ability to point the hooked ears in anticipation volcanically high. Said excitement and curiosity give way to amazement when Bob Dylan is able to surprise with his conclusively simplified and not least romantic philosophy of life.
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Cleveland Scene
Armed with a batch of new tunes (most co-written with Grateful Dead scribe Robert Hunter) and aided by the accordion work of Los Lobos frontman David Hidalgo, Bob Dylan and his touring "cowboy band" have fashioned another gem — a smoldering mix of Tex-Mex border music and 1950s Chicago blues.
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Express
It is essentially a major‑key blues album overloaded with Bob’s supreme talent for mischief and kindly late-life grouchiness.
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Entertainment
While Dylan’s grim-reaper ruminations are familiar territory, Together Through Life does offer some surprises. Produced, like his last two albums, by Dylan ?alter ego ”Jack Frost,” it prominently features south-of-the-border-style accordion (courtesy of Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo) throughout, which handsomely frames the guitar playing of Tom Petty sideman Mike Campbell.
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Vulture
Actually, it’s strange — Together Through Life hews pretty close to the template of Modern Times and Love and Theft. . . . Most of them have a slight south-of-the-border feel (plus accordion, which may not be your thing), but after a week of pretty careful listening to Together, we fail to see a vast difference in quality between its first nine songs and the first nine songs on those other albums.
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New Haven Register
This is a 10-song album that's a lot less serious, more spontaneous. It sounds like Dylan and the band were having fun in the studio, playing a set of upbeat, bluesy and catchy barroom tunes. The album rambles a bit. It zigs where you might foresee a zag, changes things up when you least expect it. . . . "Together Through Life" is far better and more consistent than Dylan's mid-'80s and '90s work. It's an unexpected treat from a guy who usually doesn't deliver those.
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Chor Penning
. . . if Together Through Life is what he wants to be doing right now, bully for him. But I don’t want to hear it. Dylan used to be strident and funny and obnoxious and whimsical and weird, but Together Through Life is dull and predictable and lifeless and, because it is those three things, also depressing as hell.
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NOW Magazine
I guess we're supposed to be grateful whenever Bob Dylan gives us even a slim disc like this one, but I wish I could hear evidence that, in the making of Together Through Life, he'd broken just a little bit of a sweat. These 10 tunes feel dashed off.
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Bullz-Eye
So the reality here is that, on Together through Life, the big surprise is not so much that Dylan pumped out another solid record just three years after Modern Times, but that he went back to the creative well with Hunter for nine of this album’s 10 songs and didn’t draw up much in the way of muddy water.
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Time Out
. . . the main shortcoming of Together Through Life is that it lacks a defining characteristic. It's a breezy grab bag, enjoyable yet decidedly low-impact.
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Sound Bytes
Despite this positive turn of events, Dylan has now reversed himself again on his new album, “Together Through Life,” which witnesses the bard returning to his freewheelin’ modus operandi and with surprisingly exciting results. The album rocks with the blues spirit of an after-hours, accordion-laced roadhouse jam session.
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Adrian's Album Reviews
Still, on the whole this is another very solid Dylan album. It may not startle as much as recent Dylan efforts, yet this continues a run of consistency unheard of in Dylan circles since the Sixties. That my friends, is quite something.
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Mirror
Together Through Life is further confirmation of how completely Dylan has taken control of his own career. It's a wonderfully wry and gnarled album, steeped in the deep learning, hard truths and joyful deliverance of the folk and blues that bred him.
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Classic Rock 102.9 MGK
This album just doesn't move and swing enough for me. It's Bob's 33rd studio album (although google him and you'll find all different counts: 46th! 53rd!) and he really doesn't have to prove anything to anyone. ADDENDUM!!!! Since writing this review, I must admit that I have been ensnared in the feverish intensity of "It's All Good". It pays to go back and listen to albums a second, third and even fourth time!!!!!
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