Album Review: Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy

 

In 1989 Bob Dylan arrived in New Orleans at a moment in his career when he appeared to have lost something essential. After Knocked Out Loaded and Down in the Groove, years of relentless touring, and a somewhat uneven run of albums, the prospect of a major new Dylan record no longer seemed assured.

It is in this climate that Oh Mercy begins to take shape. The songs were written in Malibu, yet the album was recorded in New Orleans during the early months of 1989. In Chronicles, Volume One, Dylan devotes one of the book’s most vivid sections to the making of Oh Mercy, portraying an artist immersed in an environment that seems to possess a life of its own.

New Orleans is a city that resists being reduced to mere backdrop. Dylan experiences it as something mysterious, visceral, almost autonomous, a place that moves, breathes, and continually generates music. It is a city where the past never quite recedes, and where traditions still circulate through the streets. For a writer in search of himself, it proves fertile ground.

For this reason Oh Mercy assumes a different character from the outset. The city enters the record not as folklore but as atmosphere. Local musicians help shape this transformation, bringing blues, rhythm and blues, gospel, and Louisiana traditions into the sessions without turning them into an exercise in reconstruction. Willie Green, Tony Hall, Cyril Neville, and Brian Stoltz are among those involved, working alongside Daniel Lanois.

Yet New Orleans offers above all a climate, an energy, a sonic material still waiting to be ordered. To turn this into a coherent musical vision requires someone able to listen to the songs and understand what they need.

The meeting with Daniel Lanois marks the decisive turning point. Not because Lanois has to “save” Dylan, nor because he invents something absent from the material. The songs are already there. The task is to find a sonic form capable of revealing their strength and, above all, of creating an environment in which Dylan can truly hear them again.

Lanois arrives after an earlier, unsatisfactory attempt with Ronnie Wood. It is Bono of U2 who facilitates the introduction. By then Lanois is already known for his work with Peter Gabriel and U2.

He understands that these songs do not require spectacular production. They need space, depth, and a coherent atmosphere. His approach yields a dense yet rarefied sound in which guitars seem to emerge from mist, organs often remain in the background, and the rhythm section never asserts itself aggressively.

Dylan’s voice is placed inside a sonic environment that heightens its shadows, its fractures, and its particular intensity.

New Orleans is not simply the location of the sessions. Lanois works with musicians rooted in the city and allows that musical substance to enter the songs without reducing it to local colour. Blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, and Southern tradition are absorbed and recomposed into a personal form, often dark, nocturnal, almost suspended. The album feels conceived for the hours when the city changes its face and outlines grow less definite.

The nocturnal dimension is not merely an aesthetic choice. Lanois approaches much of the work through that atmosphere: darkness, silence, a sharper awareness of sound and instrument, the freedom to let a song unfold without explanation. In Oh Mercy this method becomes integral to the result. The songs seem to arise from a place where the boundary between reality, memory, desire, and unease grows continually thinner.

Lanois’s real achievement is to have created an environment in which Dylan can once again trust his own songs.

When “Political World” opens the record, Oh Mercy makes clear at once that it has no interest in a simple return to form. It is a tense, almost nervous beginning in which Dylan surveys a world stripped of moral coordinates, a society in which courage seems to belong to the past and everything appears provisional, threatened, on the verge of disintegration. The song moves with the restless energy of rock ’n’ roll, yet beneath that energy lies a deeply pessimistic vision.

It is not merely the political world in the narrow sense. It is an entire human reality in which politics, relationships, interests, and conscience have become part of the same disorder. Contemporary critics recognised this quality immediately, speaking of a bitter social inventory and identifying the song as one of Dylan’s most convincing returns to his gift for observing the present.

“Where Teardrops Fall” introduces a different temperature. The album is not composed solely of anguish. Within the darkness there remain tenderness, desire, memory, and the possibility of closeness. It is an early signal that Oh Mercy refuses to treat despair as absolute: it moves through it, observes it, yet continues to look for something on the other side.

“Everything Is Broken” is the album’s manifesto. The title is so simple it becomes universal. Everything is broken, objects, relationships, promises, expectations, perhaps even the language we use to impose order. Musically, however, Dylan refuses to turn it into a funeral march. There is movement, irony, a kind of nervous cheerfulness. The contrast makes the song more powerful still: the world is falling apart and yet keeps moving.

“Ring Them Bells” shifts pace and register, reaching one of the highest points on the record. A piano ballad with a liturgical quality, it functions almost as a secular hymn. Biblical language is not deployed to proclaim resolved faith but to place the world under scrutiny.

Bells, saints, pagans, the shepherd, the sheep, the “chosen few” inhabit a landscape in which the sacred and the profane continually overlap. The world is “deep and wide,” yet also “on its side,” something is out of joint.

Time appears to move in the wrong direction; the figures invoked seem unable to restore order. The song offers no religious answer. It issues a summons. The bells must ring because someone, somewhere, still needs to wake.

Lanois later spoke of being struck by the clarity with which Dylan presented the song, then contributing to its spare architecture.

“Man in the Long Black Coat” carries the unease into darker territory. The story appears simple, yet the more one listens the more elusive it becomes. A man arrives, a woman leaves, someone tries to understand what has happened, but no explanation is forthcoming. The figure in black seems to step from an ancient ballad, from a legend in which sin, desire, death, and temptation are not separate categories.

The song unfolds in a metaphysical space balanced between past and present. It carries the flavour of a medieval ballad viewed through the psychological lens of contemporary loss.

“Most of the Time,” “What Good Am I?,” “Disease of Conceit,” “What Was It You Wanted,” and “Shooting Star” form a sequence of such coherence that it is difficult to identify a weak point. These five songs follow one another on the official track listing, closing the album with “Shooting Star.”

“Most of the Time” ranks among Dylan’s great songs of disillusioned love. The narrator insists he has succeeded in forgetting, that he can live without the other person, that he is once again master of his life. Yet the phrase “most of the time” continually undercuts that certainty.

“What Good Am I?” shifts the conflict from love to conscience. The title question is one of the harshest on the album: what value does a man have who sees pain, injustice, and suffering yet cannot act? Dylan interrogates himself without the alibi of the external observer.

“Disease of Conceit” confronts pride, ego, and the conviction of superiority directly. It has the air of a sermon, yet lacks the doctrinal certainty of the Christian-period songs. It is unsurprising that Lou Reed named it among his favourite tracks of 1989.

“What Was It You Wanted” returns to the tension between desire and expectation. The repeated question seems addressed to a lover, yet it can also be heard as a question directed at the audience. The ambiguity is valuable: the romantic relationship and the relationship between artist and public reflect each other.

With “Shooting Star” the falling star becomes an image of something that appears for an instant, lights the sky, and vanishes. Dylan thinks first of the other person, then of himself, then of what has already slipped away.

“Did I miss the mark, overstep the line?” is a sentimental question, but also a moral and spiritual one. The song seeks an answer that does not arrive.

Then the landscape suddenly widens. The engine, the bell, the last fire truck out of hell: intimacy expands into apocalyptic vision. When Dylan admits it is already too late to speak the words the other needed to hear, the star has passed.

“Shooting Star” resolves nothing. Precisely for that reason it closes Oh Mercy with quiet power.

Heard today, the album gains still greater significance when placed within Dylan’s path through the 1980s. It is easy, decades later, to describe that decade as a long negative parenthesis interrupted only by occasional bright spots.

After the Christian phase of the late 1970s came Shot of Love, Infidels, Empire Burlesque, Knocked Out Loaded, and Down in the Groove, records that are very different from one another, often contradictory, sometimes only partially successful. Dylan searched for sounds, producers, musicians, and directions. At times he seemed to engage with contemporary music; at others he returned stubbornly to his roots.

Those years contain important songs, intuitions later recovered, collaborations, experiments, and a search that never entirely ceased. The problem was never a lack of talent.

It was the difficulty of transforming that talent into truly cohesive albums. Here Oh Mercy assumes its historical place in Dylan’s discography.

In 1989 he finally succeeded in putting the pieces together. The writing returned to the centre, the voice acquired new authority, the production found a recognisable form, and the songs belonged to a single universe.

Contemporary critics spoke immediately of a “comeback.” One review noted how the album managed to combine the production values of late-1980s rock with the intimacy Dylan had always considered essential.

What makes Oh Mercy still more interesting is that its contemporaneity does not arise from any attempt to be modern at all costs. Dylan does not chase the rock of 1989. He does not try to prove he can compete with younger artists. He has no need to. Instead he finds a production that allows him to be contemporary while remaining profoundly himself.

This is a crucial passage in his history. In the years that follow he will often return to traditional forms, folk, country, blues. But Oh Mercy demonstrates that he did not need to choose between past and present. He could take the inheritance of more than twenty-five years and transform it into something new.

The session outtakes confirm the point. “Dignity,” “God Knows,” “Born in Time,” and especially “Series of Dreams” reveal a compositional fertility that extends well beyond the official track listing. “Series of Dreams,” left off the album and released later, has become one of the clearest examples of the quality of material that emerged from those sessions.

Oh Mercy should not be regarded simply as the best of Dylan’s 1980s albums, though it is certainly among the most important. Its significance exceeds any internal ranking of a decade. It is the moment when a career that seemed to have entered a phase of disorientation rediscovers direction without denying what came before.

This may be why the album continues to grow with time. In 1989 it may have registered primarily as relief: Dylan had returned to writing great songs. Today we can hear it differently. Those songs already contain many of the obsessions that would run through his later work, time, memory, guilt, faith, loss, ageing, responsibility, the relationship between the individual and the world.

From this perspective Oh Mercy already looks beyond the year of its release. Its night is not that of an artist who has reached the end of the road, but of someone who does not yet see the path clearly and therefore continues to search. The star of “Shooting Star” passes, disappears, and leaves the sky dark once more. From that apparent darkness Dylan begins to move again.

There will still be uneven records, new crises, returns to roots, transformations, extraordinary albums, and further falls. Yet after Oh Mercy it becomes much harder to claim that Bob Dylan is an artist of the past. The album demonstrates the opposite: he can move through his own myth, survive the expectations built around him, and continue to write songs that speak to the present while remaining in conversation with his entire history.

This, finally, is the true rebirth of Oh Mercy. Not the return of an old champion, not a mere critical recovery, not the triumph of an inspired producer. It is the return of a necessity. Dylan still has something to say, and he has found again the means to say it.

An essay by Dario Greco

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