#408: Time Out Of Mind- Bob Dylan

Listened to: MP3

Time Out Of Mind might just be Dylan’s The Departed. Scorsese has made better movies than The Departed, but that got him Best Picture. Much in the same vein, nobody will tell you Time Out Of Mind is Dylan’s best album, but it was the album he won Album Of The Year at the Grammy’s for. However, if you give this album a listen, you realize that Dylan found himself once again in 1997. After the rocky 80’s, and a 90’s full of cover songs, Dylan came back strong with this classic masterpiece, and while it’s certainly not Blood On The Tracks, it’s a hell of a lot better than I could ever hope to write.

The album opens on the haunting “Love Sick”, where we hear the “new” Dylan voice, no longer a whine, but now a refined gravely grumble. This track sounds almost Tom Waits-esque, but with a hint of the soundtrack to a Western movie. The guitars come in strong about two minutes in, and Dylan really says “I’m back” by the midpoint of this track. No longer the rebel, he now seems to be singing from a porch, simply watching the action and the chaos. Dylan really sets the tone by singing a song about being “Love Sick”. After 60’s and 70’s tracks like “Just Like A Woman” and “Lay Lady, Lay”, Dylan opens Time Out Of Mind by virtually throwing his arms up and saying “Fuck it!”, in his strongest surrender up until that point, and only beaten out by his Oscar-winning song “Things Have Changed”. Little are we to know that on an album that starts with being sick of love, Dylan would later sing his sweetest ballad to date.

We then charge into “Dirt Road Blues”, where Dylan creates a perfect old-school blues jam. You can tell that he was having a hell of a good time playing this song, even if the studio sessions reportedly became hell. The track fades out, and it’s thoroughly disappointing that it does, because that jam could go on for days and be marvelous. However, it has to make room for one of Dylan’s softer songs, and one of my personal favorites, “Standing In The Doorway”. This is truly one of his sweetest ballads, and even though he sings the lines “I don’t know if I’d kiss you or kill you”, you still can’t help but want to slow dance to this song with the woman you love. Dylan seems to lament so deeply on this track, but not in the scraping-the-bottom-of-his-heart way of Blood On The Tracks, but in the tired, weary, haggard manner of a broken down old man. I can only hope to feel emotion this deeply at this age.

“Million Miles” takes on a more jazzy, smoky, mysterious tone, and Dylan cuts in with his trademark grizzly anger. You feel as if you’re in some downtown dive bar late some Manhattan evening, taking in the sadness and the scum of the city. Dylan’s anger in any other man of his age would sound crotchety, but he channels it so well, filters it so good, that he creates brilliant tracks of disgruntled disgust. “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” is another one of those “new” style Dylan songs that became so prominent on later releases like Love & Theft or Modern Times. A nice, relaxing, upbeat song that the younger Dylan would have probably spit venom at, but the older Dylan embraces and does with such finesse and perfection that you can’t help but lie back and let the music rush over you like waves on a sunlit beach. “’Til I Fell In Love With You” is a dirty, kinda sexy blues song which deserves at least one stripper dancing to it, because if Dylan didn’t have that in mind at least once, than this is a miraculous coincidence, since every person I’ve talked to about this song agrees it’s a stripper song.

“Not Dark Yet” is a song who’s tone can be summed up in one marvelous line “There’s not even room enough to be anywhere”. Dylan seems to lament not a lost love, not a wasted life, but simply feeling lost and lonely. This track is a tragic song who’s emotion seems to connect with everyone. Not only was it featured on the Wonder Boys soundtrack (not surprising) but on the album The Passion Of The Christ: Songs Inspired By (WTF?!?!?!?!?!?!?!). Clearly this song can connect to a lot of people, and by the end of this track, I was so absorbed, I didn’t even type anything passed that last sentence.

“Cold Irons Bound” is the Grammy winning single off the album, and one of the most musically dynamic on it. Everything really seems to come together on this track, and the Michael Gray quote seems to say it all:

“There's an interesting tension, too, in "Cold Irons Bound," perhaps more accurately an interesting inappropriateness between, on one side, the grinding electronic blizzard of the music and the cold, aircraft-hangar echo of the voice lamenting its sojourn across a lethal planet - fields turned brown, sky lowering with clouds of blood, winds that can tear you to shreds, mists like quicksand - and on the other side the recurrently stated pursuit of tenderness, in phrases that seem imported from another consciousness...It's decidedly odd to hear, pitched against the scraping Lanois winds half tearing us to shreds, sentiments as obdurately "romantic" as
I found my own, found my one in you
or
Lookin' at you and I'm on my bended knee
or
I tried to love and protect you
and to hear such a defensively bleak, exhausted old voice articulate the thought that
I'm gonna remember forever the joy we've shared.”

After “Cold Iron Bound” we get to my favorite song on the album, a track which I find to be one of the greatest, most heartfelt, and most beautiful love songs ever written, “Make You Feel My Love”. I first heard this song as performed by Billy Joel, and the Dylan version manages to pack in even more emotion and sincerity, in spit of, or perhaps in part due to, his raspy growling vocals.



“When the rain I blowing on your face/and the whole world is on your case/I will offer you a warm embrace/to make you feel me love”. How honest is that? How stirringly simple? Dylan doesn’t offer to make her problems go away. He can’t make the rain stop or get to world to leave her be. But he can offer her himself, and remind her that she is loved. It seems to echo the “I know it’s not much but it’s the best I can do” sentiment of Elton John’s “Your Song”, but in a new, worn-out attitude. It’s no longer the exuberance of young love, but the desire to settle down, the commitment, the need to find someone to surrender to, to cradle in your arms at night, to live out the rest of your life with. To me, this song is perfection. It’s a beautiful love song, and honestly on of the finest things Dylan has ever composed.

“Can’t Wait” is a soft, bitter track where Dylan seems to reject every sentiment he just established in the last track, while alluding to the themes of his later masterpiece, “Things Have Changed”. The album ends on “Highlands”, which at 16 minutes is the longest Dylan track ever recorded in a studio, and since it has no chorus, and is just a series of verses, it reminds one of the closer to Blonde On Blonde, namely “Sad Eyed Lady Of the Lowlands”. It sounds like a modern recording of an old Hank Williams track, and really comes out as the most obvious and perfect closer for such a masterful album. Laid back but saying so much, like the best new Dylan tracks do.

It’s criminal that this album is ranked so low on this list, as to me, it really is one of the best of Dylan’s career. He started a new chapter in his life, and even if this is the only highlight, it’s a fantastic place to end. Seriously, get this album, it’s highly worth the purchase.

-Mike

Tomorrow is #62: Achtung Baby by U2.