Bob Dylan - Shot of Love
Guest critic Gerald Thimbleton
Bob Dylan’s Shot of Love is a lunging, uneven, occasionally astonishing record that sounds like a painter who has discovered religion but misplaced his brushes. It is less a finished canvas than a studio floor of splattered oils, with one masterpiece leaning quietly in the corner, half-forgotten.
A frayed gospel frame
Shot of Love arrives advertised as the last of Dylan’s “Christian trilogy,” but the piety here is already flaking at the edges. Where the earlier gospel records at least pretended to liturgical order, this one is a bar-band catechism, all stomp and snare, as if salvation had to be shouted over cheap monitors and flat beer. The title track comes on like a street preacher with a busted microphone: conviction in abundance, articulation in short supply.
Technique versus conviction
As with so much late Dylan, one hears ideas that might have benefited from the basic courtesies of composition and arrangement. The production is notoriously fraught—multiple studios, rejected mixes, a revolving door of takes—and the result is less “raw” than underpainted, as though someone stopped halfway through the underdrawing and declared the sketch complete. Traditional craft, the thing Dylan once commanded effortlessly, is here treated as a suspicious luxury.
The genre pieces
“Property of Jesus” and “Watered-Down Love” function like polemical pamphlets rather than songs, all thesis, no chiaroscuro. They mistake scolding for drama, hammering at mockers and modern romance with the subtlety of a roller dipped straight into the can. “Lenny Bruce,” ostensibly an elegy, is painted in thin, hurried strokes—more caption than portrait—revealing far more about the artist’s haste than the subject’s complexity.
Cracks in the sermon
More interesting are the moments where the sermon falters and the man reappears. “Heart of Mine” and “In the Summertime” smuggle in romantic doubt and self-reproach, hints of a secular interior life leaking through the doctrinal plaster. The album’s much-discussed “rawness” is less a virtue than a tell: you can almost hear Dylan trying to sing his way out of the box he has nailed himself into.
The painting in the corner
And then there is “Every Grain of Sand,” the one fully realized work in this cluttered studio, the piece that makes the rest look like studies and false starts. Here, finally, composition, language, and spiritual inquiry align; the religious impulse is no longer shouted but patiently illuminated, like light finding its way across a carefully prepared ground. It is not merely the best song on Shot of Love; it is the sort of work that embarrasses its neighbors, the way a real Van Gogh would shame a wall of tourist copies.
In sum, Shot of Love is a transitional curiosity: an album defended by its fans on the grounds that intention matters more than execution—a claim no serious painter, or serious listener, should accept.
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