![]() “To me he wasn’t only a musician and a friend,” Dylan said at the time. In addition, his close friend Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead guitarist, had died in 1995 from a heart attack. He had not released any original material since the rightly slated Under the Red Sky, in 1990, recording just two albums of traditional material, Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993). He was then 56, a legend with a glorious past behind him and a much less auspicious future. ![]() As Dylan suggests in “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” it’s a voice that is confident of only one thing: “When you think you’ve lost everything, you find out you can lose a little more.It is just over 25 years since the release of Time Out of Mind, in September 1997, rekindled Bob Dylan’s career. In its place has come a voice that is less instantly arresting but nearly as disconcerting. Save for the brief reminder midway through “Highlands,” the audacity of the young, supremely confident Dylan is long gone. Now, Dylan has made a coherent, sonically striking but equally subdued ensemble album that sorts through the mess of the more recent past. Time Out of Mind is Dylan’s first studio release since the solo acoustic bookends Good As I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993), which reinvestigated the songs that fired his passion as a long-ago would-be Woody Guthrie. Only “Make You Feel My Love,” a spare ballad undermined by greetingcard lyrics, breaks the album’s spell. “It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there,” Dylan declares in “Not Dark Yet.” Shots of gallows humor ring out: “I know plenty of people put me up for a day or two,” he sings on “Million Miles,” as if affirming that he still has contact with the human race. The empathetic, low-key support flatters Dylan’s increasingly pinched voice to far greater effect than he has received on many of his recordings of the last 15 years. The instruments are aligned in the mix with a 3-D depth, and the settings veer from the echo-drenched Sun Records thump of “Dirt Road Blues” to the jazz-organ combo at closing time that is evoked on “Million Miles.” Dylan contemporaries such as pianist Jim Dickinson and organist Augie Myers, as well as blues guitarist Duke Robillard, build hypnotic, steady-rolling grooves that suggest a spooky David Lynch soundtrack. Lanois, whose heavily atmospheric productions have brought an almost disembodied eeriness to albums by U2, Peter Gabriel and Emmylou Harris, among others, applies a more restrained touch here. On Time Out of Mind, he paints a self-portrait with words and sound that pivots around a single line from the album’s penultimate song, “Can’t Wait”: “That’s how it is when things disintegrate.” ![]() The new album not only reunites Dylan with Lanois, it also expands on the tone set by such Oh Mercy songs as “Everything Is Broken” and “Man in the Long Black Coat,” in which Dylan sings, “People don’t live or die people just float.”Īs it turns out, Dylan was just getting warmed up. In this sense, Time Out of Mind is a more fully realized version of Oh Mercy, the 1989 album that Dylan recorded with producer Daniel Lanois. ![]() He projects the unease of someone adrift in a world that he ceases to understand and that has ceased to understand him. It’s a memory, a dream, a specter, as if Dylan were singing not about a companion but about something far less tangible. He sings about love gone awry, but until the surreal conversation that occurs in “Highlands,” that loss never acquires a human face. Time‘s perspective is that of an outsider speaking to an absent confidant, a distant lover, a long-departed audience. He eases out of the joint and conveys the delight of a convict who has just tunneled out into the daylight: “I’m crossing the street to get away from a mangy dog/Talkin’ 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.” Desire cools as the singer realizes that he is in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong woman. The voice - conversational, playful, sensual - snakes over a shimmering blues-guitar riff and the chords of a distant Farfisa organ as it recounts a conversation at a restaurant with a woman, a knockout “with a pretty face and long, white, shiny legs.” The narrator and his female companion spar verbally, a comical exchange of clashing values and cryptic, coded messages. You know, the skinny kid with the hurricane hair and the inscrutable smirk who blasted business as usual in the teeth? That guy.Īs the 16-minute-long “Highlands” detours from its verse-chorus-verse path to an extended narrative bridge, the deadpan twang in Dylan’s voice becomes more pronounced, and his old sly glee can be glimpsed. There is a moment near the end of Bob Dylan‘s 41st album, Time Out of Mind, when the Dylan of 35 years ago reappears.
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