Leaving almost no time for typical media fanfare or excessive hype, Bob Dylan announced in March that an album of all new songs, Together Through Life, was to be released the following month. By Dylan’s own account, the album was cut quickly with his touring band, impulsively following a recording of a song commissioned for an upcoming film. In other words, he just felt like making a record. Some of Dylan’s most vibrant past work succeeds precisely because it carries a sense of spontaneity and spark -– Nashville Skyline, Planet Waves, The Traveling Wilburys’ Volume 1, to name a few –- and Together Through Life is no exception, due to its strong set of stylistically divergent tunes, its practiced tight musicianship, and most of all because it’s so obvious how much fun Bob Dylan is having.

Though their thematic connection is tenuous at best, the songs on Together Through Life continue in the vein of Dylan’s last three studio albums…which is to say that, for the most part, they’re typically pretty dark and desperate, even if the intensity is lower than on Modern Times or Love and Theft. Several of the best tracks, like opener “Beyond Here Lies Nothing” or “Forgetful Heart,” reflect some of Time Out of Mind’s pervasive depressive solitude, as though they might have been written while out in the Highlands of that album’s closing track. Not to say these songs are typically heavy, though –- on the contrary, there is a playfulness both in the genre-hopping and the song structures. As has been his way of late, Dylan continues to craft great old-timey balladry — on this album, in the ’20s style parlor piano ballad, “Life is Hard” or the gentle Tex-Mex swing tune, “This Dream of You.” Two other tracks –- “If You Ever Go to Houston” and “I Feel A Change Coming On” –- recall Modern Times’s “Spirit on the Water” -– wistful, sweet songs with long, sincere melody lines — yet another style of Dylan song, well-suited for his vocal delivery and sure to be highlights of his live show.

Unsurprisingly, though, most of the album is drawn from the straight-ahead Muddy Waters blues and swamp rock that is his band’s strength. Not to say they’re not trained at stylistic eclecticism –- they are…but their style is well-founded through years of touring together, and it tends to seep through, even in the less bluesy tracks. Songs like “My Wife’s Home Town,” “Jolene” or “Shake Shake Mama” would be only half as fun as they are if the band weren’t so natural in these traditional blues styles. The album arrangements do have their unique flourishes, though. Mike Campbell (of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) plays guitar throughout the album, and his style is unmistakable and always electric, and Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo’s accordion is a central tenant of the album’s consistently wistful sound. In one way or another — sometimes only by very loose definition — Bob Dylan has always played the blues, and it’s a testament to this group of musicians that they give him room to find new textures and approaches to the form.

Some disappointments have already been voiced (and more surely will be) about the lyrics, which are admittedly straightforward and use conventional southern imagery more than the metaphor-laden sketches for which Dylan is best known. Such will always be his lot, to weather that kind of criticism –- but on this album, the lyrics work not as centerpieces but instead in service of its two greatest attributes: the sound of the record and the sound of Dylan’s voice. This is the third consecutive album Dylan self-produced (under pseudonym Jack Frost), but unlike Love and Theft or Modern Times, the production here is more noticeable. Though it lacks Daniel Lanois’s sonic landscape, it has more in common with Time Out of Mind than with the other two. In particular, it’s both a certain restraint in the mix –- even in its jauntiest moments, it never gets very loud or direct — nothing like “Thunder on the Mountain” or “Honest With Me” -– and more so a haze around Dylan’s voice that imbues it with a mystical and melancholic feel. The lyrics are occasionally haunting too: “Beyond here lies nothing but the mountains of the past”…but more often they’re sillier, more in line with the thrown-together nature of the record: “Well, there’s reasons for that and reasons for this/I can’t think of any just now/But I know they exist/I’m sitting the sun till my skin turns brown/I just want to say that hell’s my wife’s hometown.” But it’s not that they’re slight — on the contrary, as with the predominately typical love songs of Nashville Skyline; the modesty and seemingly effortless lyrics of the new record carry a certain charm that works in counterpoint to the more personal nuances of its sound.

But look, the real joy in this album lies where it usually does, in Bob Dylan’s voice and singing. As far back as his first album, Bob Dylan has wanted to sound like an old man (or at least like Charley Patton), and he has always had the ability to endow his voice with the semblance of old-age wisdom and suffering. “Some people say I have the blood of the land in my voice,” he sings in “I Feel a Change Coming On,” and there is little doubt that he is relishing the opportunity to use his voice, now actually ravaged by time, to its full effect. He’s always distinguished himself through the soul of his performances, but as a singer, Dylan has always been very much in control, masterfully using the nuances, eccentricities and even the limits of his singing for effect. On Together Through Life, the evidence of that control is incessantly apparent, as he growls, creaks, croons, barks, bites and pleads, all with the fresh, vibrant, spontaneous air of a guy who loves what he’s singing.

Bob Dylan will turn 68 this May. He released the album that started his rise to fame in 1963. Certainly he has peers who continue to produce new work, but there are few who continue to garner the attention and fascination that he does. But the mystery is not so difficult to answer. Listening to Together Through Life, you hear the fruits of his experience and the profundity of his perceptions, but you also hear the indelible marks of youth and energy, the spirit not of looking back to provide answers but looking forward to keep asking the questions. Here’s to another 40 years.