When Bob Dylan writes from his wounded heart, he can be eloquent. When he writes from the head, he can be clairvoyant. And when Dylan the man teams with Dylan the yarn-spinner, lines are written that could serve as epigraphs to whole lives: "If you don't believe there's a price for this sweet paradise / Just remind me to show you the scars." Regardless of Dylan's musical trappings, people still search his albums for lines that strong; I know I do. Street-Legal has quite a few….

The Dylan I respect … is the free associator, the crazed doggerel genius whose songs make sense a hundred different ways. A lot of fools write love songs, but there's only one "Highway 61 Revisited." The best thing about Street-Legal is that Dylan's letting his mind ramble again, going further afield than he did on Blood on the Tracks, making Desire sound like setting-up exercises...