During intermission, I overhear the sour-faced woman behind us, the one who hasn’t quit complaining all evening, reassure her teenage daughter, whose idea this concert clearly wasn’t, that she’ll recognize Dylan when he comes on, since she’s “heard his music in movies and TV commercials.” Later, when Dylan does come on, I wonder if the kid actually does recognize anything. Maybe she caught Wonder Boys and stayed through the closing credits for “Things Have Changed,” which he plays at Campanelli with energy and the appropriate snarl. Or maybe she identifies the voice from Victoria’s Secret ads. More likely, despite her mother’s patronizing reassurances, she doesn’t recognize anything at all. Maybe she isn’t even listening. It’s all right, ma, I’m only bored silly.

It doesn’t matter. Just as it didn’t matter that nearly half the set list was taken up by songs from 2001’s Love and Theft, an album I confess never having bonded with as viscerally or intellectually as I did with masterpieces like Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, or Blood on the Tracks (call me retro). I still liked and admired Dylan for being on that stage, rocking harder at age 63 than ever before. I loved holding Sadi close as he rasped his way through “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You”—an apt reminder that Dylan, too, knows his way around country music. I was glad to hear the band play so loud. I was glad that the show didn’t bear out my prediction of Dylan singing duets on “Girl from the North Country” with Willie Nelson in place of Johnny Cash. I was glad to see a few people in the field dancing with their children during the jumping, jiving finale “Summer Days.”

But what I didn’t feel, and what made the performance at Campanelli Stadium ultimately seem a bit cursory, was the sense of conviction and engagement that shone through in earlier Dylan concerts. No matter how many times he used to rework his material, no matter how much he bent and twisted those verses from performance to performance, he still sounded like he believed in them. These were his words, and he had written them for a reason. When he sang “It’s Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)” on Before the Flood, you know he meant every line, and you can hear how the audience responded. Part of it, I admit, is that I hadn’t seen Dylan live in quite some time, and it was difficult not to compare him now with back then. But I remember him performing “Gates of Eden” at Radio City in the late 1980s, nearly a quarter century after its debut on Bringing It All Back Home, investing it with more passion and vitality than on the original record.