Sometimes an artist narrows his scope to increase his depth. The lyrics here don’t have the kaleidoscopic dandyism of Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde. Dylan would be exhaustingly false if he still wrote the same way after 40 years. Instead, the blues and country and the lilting pop styles of the ’30s open up roads between the past and the present, allowing him a simultaneous ease and fervor, a way of burrowing into the root mysteries.

The mysteries are all present in “When the Levees Break.” On a Dylan album released in the week that marks the first anniversary of Katrina, a song with that title can’t help raise the expectation of a Major Statement. It is, but it’s a sideways statement, not the outraged reporting of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” or “Who Killed Davey Moore?” The song — an upbeat blues of all things — places Katrina in the lineage of disasters that country and folk ballads and blues have commemorated. To take another line from Greil Marcus, “In the strange decor of the past, ordinary acts themselves seem strange.” Katrina was not ordinary, but to render it as the subject of an old-time blues, the type of song we experience as strange, brings home how unthinkable an event it was.

The present comes alive here in the language of the past. Reverence is inextricable from dread (“Everybody saying this is a day only the Lord could make”). The most direct empathy (“Well, I look in your eyes, I see nobody other than me”) exists alongside naked horror (“Some people on the road carryin’ everything they own/Some people got barely enough skin to cover their bones”). And the pleasures of this life are so transitory, they hardly bear mentioning in the face of waiting Glory (“Put on your cat clothes, mama, put on your evening dress/Few more years of hard work, then there’ll be a thousand years of happiness”).

And so time isn’t the only distance that collapses. In “When the Levees Break,” some of the distances that exist within this country also disappear. We look in the eyes of the displaced and see the flood threatening to wash away us all. And Dylan’s voice, which has been with us so long we can take it for granted, sounds as if it were coming to us from years ago. Or from tomorrow.

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