At about 3:30 p.m. every day for two weeks last May, Bob Dylan arrived at a recording studio in midtown Manhattan and went straight to work. Dylan was making Love and Theft, his first studio album in four years. "And it was work," says organist and accordion player Augie Meyers, an old friend of Dylan's who played on the new record with the members of Dylan's touring band: guitarists Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton, bassist Tony Garnier and think, 'What are we gonna do today?' And Bob would walk in, have all his papers there and go, 'Let's try this in [the key of] C.'

"There was none of this 'Hi, what's happening?' and a bit of BS," says the Texas-born Meyers, 61, who played in the Sir Douglas Quintet and has known Dylan since the 1960s. "It was, 'OK, let's go to work.' After we were through, at ten o'clock at night, it seemed like we'd only been there a couple of hours, because it was so much fun. Every day was a special day, because every day was a new song."

Love and Theft, to be released by Columbia Records on September 11th, caps an extended period of triumph for Dylan, who turned sixty on May 24th. His last studio album, 1997's Time Out of Mind, won three Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year. Earlier this year, Dylan took home an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for his contribution to the Wonder Boys soundtrack, "Things Have Changed." And the eleven new original songs on Love and Theft — a twelfth, "Mississippi," is a Time Out of Mind outtake that Dylan recut for the new record — reflect the power and variety of his live shows in the last half-decade.

Love and Theft is vastly different in tone and atmosphere from Time Out of Mind, even though both records feature Dylan's group. The latter was produced by Daniel Lanois with an emphasis on shadows and foreboding. Dylan, in turn, produced Love and Theft (under an alias, Jack Frost) with a focus on vocal melodies and the interplay of Campbell and Sexton's guitars. Combining incisive reflection and complex narrative with sprawling, guitar-enriched Americana — jump blues, rockabilly, mountain balladry and saloon croon — Dylan has made one of the most jubilant and compelling records of his career. Asked why he recut "Mississippi" for Love and Theft and produced the album himself, Dylan replies, "If you had heard the original recording, you'd see in a second. The song was pretty much laid out intact melodically, lyrically and structurally, but Lanois didn't see it. Thought it was pedestrian. Took it down the Afro-polyrhythm route — multirhythm drumming, that sort of thing. Polyrhythm has its place, but it doesn't work for knifelike lyrics trying to convey majesty and heroism.