Album Review: Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind

Album Review: Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind 

Time Out of Mind is Bob Dylan’s 30th studio album, as well as one of his greatest successes, recognized by critics, audiences, and, for once, by the awards it received. It may sound strange today, but the record was hailed as Album of the Year, ahead of releases such as Paul McCartney’s Flaming Pie and Radiohead’s OK Computer.

Although issued as a single CD, Time Out of Mind is in reality a double studio album. Wikipedia claims it was the first double album since Self Portrait (1970), but the last one had actually been The Basement Tapes (1975). The total running time is 72 minutes and 50 seconds, with the single track “Highlands” reaching double figures at 16 minutes and 31 seconds.Recorded at the imposing Criteria Studios in Miami, the album once again features Daniel Lanois at the helm.

In some ways it can be seen as a kind of sequel to Oh Mercy, even though there are clear differences in sound, approach, and execution. Here the artist seems to have greater control and freedom of movement.

Where Oh Mercy was agile, short, and concise, Time Out of Mind — while possessing a definite sonic and atmospheric signature — recalls, in certain respects, the working method Dylan had successfully employed between the late 1960s and early 1970s.It is a very dark album, at times depressing, yet it contains one of the finest collections of songs since Blood on the Tracks, Desire, and Infidels.

Moreover, compared with the kind of records Dylan’s fans have long cherished, this album managed to win over almost the entire musical community — blues and country listeners, but especially the more heterogeneous rock audience — thanks to its full, present sound, which for once feels well-centered and carefully balanced during the album’s strongest moments. There is no denying that the artist who entered the studio was in a state of compositional grace.

It is no coincidence that, alongside his usual inspired ballads, he pulled from his hat a successful single like “Make You Feel My Love,” later covered by artists such as Billy Joel, Adele, Bryan Ferry, and Garth Brooks. The great lyrics are back, and we can say we are hearing at least four new Dylan classics, another handful of songs of absolute value, and perhaps only two or three fillers such as “’Til I Fell in Love with You,” “Dirt Road Blues,” and “Million Miles.

”The atmospheres evoke certain twilight westerns about the end of the frontier myth. Greil Marcus himself remarked that the album reminded him, in some ways, of an alternative score for Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. In this case, however, we hear the laments and the malaise of a man who has always known how to distill gold from his own darkness.

Musically the record draws inspiration from seminal artists such as Charley Patton, Little Walter, and Little Willie John (names to which Dylan himself would later add Buddy Holly during his Grammy acceptance speech).

Dylan is on a journey, heading toward the unknown, the Nowhere, even if here and there he alludes to real places,Baltimore, New Orleans, Missouri, Boston-town, or describes having visited London and Paris, just as he once did with Rome in “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” The competitive urge to confront his own imposing past also returns. The impression is that his sentimental troubles and the call to arms of a suffering heart, metaphorically and otherwise, gave him the perfect assist and the will to hand over to death a drop of splendor, humanity, and truth.

On the lyrical side, critics often cite John Keats, Robert Burns, and the visionary William Blake. In particular, the lyrics of “Not Dark Yet” seem to answer Keats’s poem “Ode to a Nightingale.”For Jochen Markhorst, “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” ranks among the author’s “most beautiful works,” offering a “more accessible” counterpart to the celebrated “Not Dark Yet” because it presents “the prospect of redemption in an afterlife.

”From a sonic point of view, special mention must also be made of Mark Howard’s excellent work with Dylan’s harmonica, which here can be appreciated for its electric quality and distorted tone, dominant between verses. A superb, capital track, as, indeed, is the entire album in its moments of greatest inspiration and intensity. Beyond the praise that must be shared between the artist and the producer, it is worth citing some of the musicians who took part in the sessions.

Dylan brought in what was then his stage band, featuring the trusted Tony Garnier on bass, David Kemper on drums, Bucky Baxter on acoustic guitar and pedal steel, along with old acquaintances such as Jim Keltner and, above all, organist Augie Meyers and steel-guitar and dobro player Cindy Cashdollar. This combination, which naturally also includes Dylan and Lanois themselves, is further augmented by additional players such as percussionist Tony Mangurian, Duke Robillard, Robert Britt, and two more drummers: Winston Watson and Brian Blade. The production and recording approach at times feels like an updated version of Blonde on Blonde.

As for the lyrics, Bob Dylan’s special brand of despair is fully present in lines from songs such as “Not Dark Yet,” “Love Sick,” “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” and especially “Cold Irons Bound,” where he declares:

“There’s too many people, too many to recall. I thought some of ’em were my friends; I was wrong about ’em all. Well, the road is rocky and the hillside’s mud. Up over my head nothing but clouds of blood. I found my world, found my world in you. But your love just wasn’t true. I’m twenty miles out of town, cold irons bound.”

Among the finest statements about this album, some come from Dylan himself and from Daniel Lanois. “Those records were made a long time ago, and you know, honestly, the recordings that were made in those days were all good. They had a little magic about them because the technology didn’t go beyond what the artist was doing. It was much easier to get excellence on a record in those days than it is now. The biggest priority now is technology. It’s not the artist or the art. It’s the technology that’s coming in.

That’s what makes Time Out of Mind special. It doesn’t take itself seriously, but then again, the sound is very significant to that record. If that record had been made more casually, it wouldn’t have sounded that way. It wouldn’t have had the impact that it did. There was no wasted effort on Time Out of Mind, and I don’t think there will be on any of my records anymore.

”A declaration of intent that, years later, we can still fully endorse.With his thirtieth and inspired studio album, Bob Dylan returned to his levels of excellence, where missteps became far fewer and far less significant. It is one of the essential records of the second half of his career. A non-negligible fact: from these sessions, songs of the caliber of “Mississippi” (later released on the subsequent Love and Theft), the splendid and rare “Red River Shore,” “Marching to the City” (issued on Volume 8 of the Bootleg Series), and “Dreamin’ on You” (also recovered on the 2008 anthology Tell Tale Signs) were left on the cutting-room floor.

Among the beautiful interpretations of this album, at least three covers deserve mention: “Not Dark Yet” by the late Jimmy LaFave, “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” by David Bowie, and “Make You Feel My Love” by Bryan Ferry, from his 2007 tribute album Dylanesque.

A monumental and essential album for anyone wishing to know the artist’s work more deeply. A triumphant return. 

An essay by Dario Greco

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