If this album isn't Dylan's best, it's probably in the top two. Every song on this album is phenomenal.  You get through track ten, and you think "Wow, that previous sixty minutes of music literally threw me flat on my back."  Good enough, right?  Pshaw!  You haven't even gotten to his 16 minute ballad Highlands.

For me, this album exists in liminal time.  The album has been out for ten years now.  I only started listening to Dylan some five years back.  Yet somehow it took me a few years to find out this album existed.  Its discovery was like a micro-revolution.  Most of Dylan's stuff is the remnant of ancient history.   Yet, so many decades of experience and growth later, and he's still releasing remarkably different poetry.  It's as if he's speaking to me simultaneously from both the past and the present.  Both voices have a place reserved for them in history, yet one is still growing and unfolding as we speak. It's like a three-way conversation, where none of the three parties can hear each other.

I tried to explain it to a former girlfriend of mine, and she just thought I was gay.

I don't know how I can only pick a few songs on this album to talk about.  I'll skip "Not Dark Yet", because I'm not obsessed with death, and pick three others:

• Love Sick: "I'm sick of love. But I'm in the thick of it.". This is the quintessential rallying cry of the lonely person. Or at least, a better slogan than Cher's "Song for the Lonely". Like moths to a flame, nobody can resist love. It aggravates us, humiliates us, and destroys us, yet we always return for another beating. Love and hate are not opposites, they are two sides of the same coin, and this song effortlessly captures this feeling.
• Can't Wait: Dylan tries to reconcile the confusing smorgasbord of feelings he has towards his longtime love in this seemingly futile song. I'm too young to have experienced the kind of love that comes from 65 years of life, but the snippets I can glean from this song capture the weariness and hopefulness of navigating love's ebbs and flows. Read the lyrics again and again, but if you're strapped for time, just enjoy this: "If I saw you coming, I don't know what I would do/I'd like to think I could control myself, but it isn't true/That's how it is when things disintegrate."
• Highlands: This song is impressive for more than its length. Back when I had an iPod and a Vespa, I used to turn this on after a long day's work and finish this eerie song by the time I got home. It's like one of his long, surrealist ballads of yore (think Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands or Desolation Row), but slower and starring Dylan. He's basically just wandering around aimlessly, describing things that amuse him. And it somehow never gets old. The best parts is a three-to-four minute sequence where he casually flirts with a waitress. She tries to get him to draw a picture of him, and he coyly replies "I don't do sketches from memory." Towards the end, when he's at his most senile, he drops this sequence that makes me laugh out loud: "I'm crossing the street to get away from a mangy dog/Talking to myself in a monologue/I think what I need might be a full length leather coat/Somebody just asked me If I registered to vote".