My sweetie gave me Bob Dylan's "Modern Times" for my birthday. This is the Dylan album you can play for people who never dreamed they would like Dylan. Load "Spirit On The Water" on your iPod for a wedding reception and it will sound perfectly at hime.

The arrangements and song structures are listener friendly, the producer (Dylan, under the Jack Frost pseudonym) has a knowing hand, and Dylan makes the effort to sing like he's happy to get these good songs off his chest.

The band is a cosmopolitan bluesy-Western mix. Some of it sounds like "Highway 61" and half the time I expect the band to break into "Johnny B. Goode." The lyrics range from the apocalypse-light "The Levee's Gonna Break'":

If it keep on rainin', the levee gonna break / Everybody saying this is a day only the Lord could make
Put on your cat clothes, mama, put on your evening dress / Few more years of hard work, then there'll be a 1,000 years of happiness

to "Someday Baby", which shows Dylan's mastery of blues style and would make a foolproof cover:

You can take your clothes / put 'em in a sack
You goin' down the road / baby and you can't come back
Someday baby, you ain't gonna worry / po' me any more

You also get Newmanesque throwaways like "Well, the world of research has gone berserk / Too much paperwork." The only clinker is "Workingman's Blues #2." Burn a CD without that track and you've got the most satisfying Dylan disk in ages. There's also an interesting literary link, with Dyan borrowing some of his lines from a 19th century Southern poet named Henry Timrod.

Related

• Complete album lyrics
  

• Rolling Stone interview with Dylan before "Modern Times" release

• NY Times: Who's This Guy Dylan Who's Borrowing Lines From Henry Timrod?

• Dylan, Nimrod, and Me

• Wikipedia entry for Henry Timrod