[5] A limited edition release included a separate disc with two bonus tracks recorded in the early 1960s, and two years later, on September 16, 2003, this album was remixed into 5.1 surround sound and became one of 15 Dylan titles reissued and remastered for SACD playback.

"[10] Dylan would subsequently employ Shaw to engineer and mix his albums Modern Times (2006) and Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) as well as various non-album tracks.

The title of the album was apparently inspired by historian Eric Lott's book Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, which was published in 1993.

"It rolls in like a storm, drums galloping over the horizon into ear shot, guitar riffs slicing with terse dexterity while a tale about a pair of vagabonds unfolds," writes Kot.

"It ends in death, and sets the stage for an album populated by rogues, con men, outcasts, gamblers, gunfighters and desperados, many of them with nothing to lose, some of them out of their minds, all of them quintessentially American.

They're the kind of twisted, instantly memorable characters one meets in John Ford's westerns, Jack Kerouac's road novels, but, most of all, in the blues and country songs of the 1920s, '30s and '40s.

[11] "Love and Theft is, as the title implies, a kind of homage," writes Kot, "[and] never more so than on 'High Water (for Charley Patton),' in which Dylan draws a sweeping portrait of the South's racial history, with the unsung blues singer as a symbol of the region's cultural richness and ingrained social cruelties.

"He leaves you dangling at the end of each bridge, lets the band punctuate the trail of words he's squeezed into his lines, which gives it a reluctant soft-shoe charm".

The album closes with "Sugar Baby", a lengthy, dirge-like ballad, noted for its evocative, apocalyptic imagery and sparse production drenched in echo.

In a Rolling Stone interview with Mikal Gilmore, Dylan himself summarized the album's themes as dealing with "business, politics and war, and maybe love interest on the side".

The spot, directed by Kinka Usher, shows Dylan in a tense poker game with magician Ricky Jay, actress Francine York and Dharma & Greg writer Eddie Gorodetsky.

On July 23, 2001, he participated in a press conference at the Hotel de la Ville in Rome[14] with reporters from Austria, Britain, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.

[15] He was also interviewed by Edna Gundersen for USA Today,[16] Robert Hilburn for the Los Angeles Times[17] and Mikal Gilmore for Rolling Stone.

The album's cover features a black-and-white photograph of Dylan, sporting a then-new pencil-thin mustache, which was taken in the studio by Kevin Mazur.

In a glowing review for his "Consumer Guide" column published by The Village Voice, Robert Christgau wrote: "If Time Out of Mind was his death album—it wasn't, but you know how people talk—this is his immortality album".

[30] Later, when The Village Voice conducted its annual Pazz & Jop critics' poll, Love and Theft topped the list, the third Dylan album to accomplish this.

[38] Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "The predictably unpredictable rock poet greeted the new millennium with a folksy, bluesy instant classic".

[42] Ian O'Riordan, in a 2021 article in the Irish Times, ranked the album sixth out of the 39, praising David Kemper's drumming and citing "Lonesome Day Blues" as his favourite track.

[45] Love and Theft generated controversy when some similarities between the album's lyrics and Japanese writer Junichi Saga's book Confessions of a Yakuza were pointed out.