Time Out of Mind (Bob Dylan album)

Based on Wikipedia: Time Out of Mind (Bob Dylan album)

The Comeback Nobody Expected

By 1996, Bob Dylan appeared to be finished as a songwriter. Not finished as a performer—he was still out there on what fans called the Never Ending Tour, playing hundreds of shows a year. But as a writer of new songs? That seemed over.

His last album of original material, 1990's Under the Red Sky, had been savaged by critics and ignored by audiences. In the six years since, Dylan had released nothing but covers of old folk songs and a live album of his own back catalog. When an interviewer asked him about writing in 1991, Dylan's answer was startling in its resignation: "Maybe a person gets to the point where they have written enough songs. Let someone else write them."

This was the man who had written "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Blowin' in the Wind." The voice of a generation, apparently ready to go silent.

Then came the winter of 1996, and something shifted.

Late Nights on a Minnesota Farm

Dylan retreated to his farm in Minnesota, and the songs started coming again. Not in the flood of his youth—back in the sixties, he could produce three or four songs in a single burst of creativity—but steadily, patiently, through long winter nights.

When producer Daniel Lanois spoke with Dylan about the new material, he was struck by how seriously Dylan had worked on the lyrics. Dylan told him he'd spent countless late nights perfecting the words. And once they were done? Dylan considered the record essentially finished. The actual recording, in his mind, was almost an afterthought.

"Whatever we decide to do with it, that's that," Dylan said.

Lanois, who had produced Dylan's 1989 album Oh Mercy and worked with artists like U2 and Emmylou Harris, knew better. What they decided to do with it would matter enormously.

Blues from Before Rock and Roll

Dylan wanted a specific sound for this record, and he knew exactly where to find it. He told Lanois to listen to early blues musicians—Charley Patton, Little Walter, Little Willie John. These weren't the famous blues names most people recognized. These were the raw, original sources, recording in the 1940s and 1950s before rock and roll even existed.

What Dylan loved about those old records was their natural depth. They had a three-dimensional quality that came not from studio tricks but from the limitations of the technology itself. A single microphone in a room. Musicians playing together, feeding off each other's energy. No overdubs, no fixing things later.

Lanois understood. He pulled out vintage equipment, including a Sony C37A microphone he'd used on Oh Mercy. He developed techniques to capture that old feeling with modern clarity.

Then they assembled the band, and things got complicated.

Controlled Chaos in Miami

The recording sessions took place at Criteria Studio in Miami, Florida, and they were, by all accounts, barely controlled chaos. Dylan had brought his own musicians—including Jim Keltner, his touring drummer from the late seventies and early eighties. Lanois had hired his own players, including slide guitarist Cindy Cashdollar and drummer Brian Blade. Then Dylan added even more: a Nashville guitarist, a Tex-Mex organist named Augie Meyers, and Memphis pianist Jim Dickinson.

Dickinson's recollection of the sessions borders on the absurd. "Twelve musicians playing live—three sets of drums," he recalled, still bewildered years later. "Two pedal steels. I've never even heard two pedal steels played at the same time before."

The result was two competing groups of musicians, with two producers who had different ideas about every song. Lanois and Dylan would escape to the parking lot to discuss strategy, sitting on the fender of a pickup truck in the Miami heat. Lanois remembered thinking that if anyone saw them out there, they wouldn't believe it.

The Artificial Sound of Authenticity

For all of Dylan's love of those raw, unprocessed blues recordings, the album that emerged didn't sound anything like them. Music historian Clinton Heylin described Time Out of Mind as perhaps the most artificial-sounding album in Dylan's entire catalog—more a showcase for Lanois's production techniques than Dylan's voice.

Dylan himself seemed to agree. In interviews after the album's release, he expressed dissatisfaction with the sound. The irony wasn't lost on observers: Dylan had wanted something organic and raw, but ended up with an album drenched in echo, reverb, and atmospheric effects.

And yet something about that combination worked. The murky, dreamlike production created distance between the listener and Dylan's voice, as if he were singing from the far end of a long hallway, or perhaps from another decade entirely. For songs about mortality, regret, and fading away, the effect was haunting.

Dylan would never work with Lanois again. Every album since has been self-produced.

Songs from the Edge of Night

The album opens with "Love Sick," a song so stripped down it barely seems to exist. Dylan shuffles through empty streets in the rain, surrounded by warped guitar and what sounds like a haunted organ playing from somewhere far away. Lanois treated Dylan's voice almost like a harmonica, overdriving it through a small amplifier to give it a distorted, breaking quality.

When Dylan performed the song at the 1998 Grammy Awards, it introduced millions of viewers to the album's unsettling atmosphere. This wasn't the Dylan of "Blowin' in the Wind." This was something darker, more fragile, and somehow more powerful.

The centerpiece of the album is "Not Dark Yet," which Time magazine called the moody album's heart. The song explores what can only be described as existential crisis—the feeling of a life winding down, of evening approaching with no hope of another morning. Professor Christopher Ricks, in his book Dylan's Visions of Sin, drew extensive parallels between the song and John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." Both works are meditations on mortality, and Ricks found echoes of Keats throughout Dylan's lyrics.

Interestingly, the early demo of "Not Dark Yet" was completely different—faster, more stripped down. Dylan transformed it during the formal sessions into something he described as a "civil war ballad," slowing it to a funeral march.

The Sixteen-Minute Goodbye

The album closes with "Highlands," and nothing about it is small. At sixteen minutes, it was the longest composition Dylan had ever released, a sprawling narrative that borrows its central refrain from Robert Burns's 1790 poem "My Heart's in the Highlands."

The song tells a strange, rambling story about the narrator's interactions with a waitress in a Boston restaurant. Dylan mentions Neil Young and author Erica Jong by name. It meanders, doubles back, loses its way, and somehow holds together.

When the band finished recording it, one of the managers asked the obvious question: did Dylan have a shorter version?

Dylan looked at him. "That was the short version."

The Songs That Got Away

Fifteen songs were recorded for the album, but only eleven made the final cut. One of the rejected tracks was "Mississippi," which Dylan would re-record four years later for his next album, Love and Theft.

Dylan blamed Lanois for the song's initial failure. The lyrics, he said, were trying to convey "majesty and heroism," but Lanois had taken the song down what Dylan called "the Afro-polyrhythm route"—complex, overlapping drum patterns that worked against the knife-like precision the lyrics demanded.

Before Dylan got around to re-recording it himself, he gave the song to Sheryl Crow, who released her version in 1998. It was an unusual move—Dylan essentially admitting that someone else could do his song justice when his own attempt had failed.

Another outtake, "Red River Shore," was considered by Jim Dickinson to be the best song from the entire session. It wouldn't see official release until 2008, more than a decade after it was recorded.

Recognition and Redemption

Time Out of Mind was released on September 30, 1997, and the response was overwhelming. Critics who had written Dylan off suddenly had to reconsider. This was not the work of an artist coasting on reputation—it was something new, something that demanded attention.

The album won three Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year. "Cold Irons Bound" won for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. Rolling Stone would eventually rank it among the 500 greatest albums of all time.

For Dylan, at fifty-six years old, it was proof that the creative well hadn't run dry. He just needed to wait for the water to rise again.

The Tension That Makes Art

Looking back at Time Out of Mind, what stands out is the productive conflict at its heart. Dylan wanted the raw sound of 1950s blues, but got an atmospheric studio production. He wanted control, but worked with a producer who had his own strong vision. He assembled too many musicians, creating chaos in the studio.

None of this should have worked. And yet the tension between Dylan's intentions and what actually happened created something neither he nor Lanois could have made alone. The album sounds like a struggle—against age, against irrelevance, against the technology Dylan distrusted—and that struggle gives it its power.

Dylan's voice on the record is ravaged, distant, often buried under waves of reverb. But it's unmistakably his voice, singing songs about endings and loss and the strange persistence of memory. For an artist everyone had given up on, it was exactly the right sound.

Not dark yet. But getting there.