I wouldn’t go so far as to call the rest of them filler, although I will gladly go on record as saying that “Make You Feel My Love” is so Billy Joel hokey Billy Joel saw fit to cover it. Toss in “Trying to Get to Heaven”–in which a broken-hearted Dylan tries to get to Heaven before they close the door–and you have my keepers, the ones I’ll always go back to. He sees “nothing to be gained by any explanation, and no words need to be said,” and if that ain’t the fatalism of romantic devastation I don’t know what is. “Standing in the Doorway” mates a startlingly lovely (and deceptively simple) melody to a complex meditation on the aching of a broken heart Dylan doesn’t know if he’d kiss her or kill her if he saw her again, and “the ghost of our old love ain’t gone away.” The guitars are perfect and Augie Meyers again comes through big time, but it’s Dylan’s off-the-cuff phrasing that wins the day halting and pensive, he sounds like he’s thinking up the words as he goes along. Dylan, his voice redolent with echo, sounds like the ghost in the machine, singing about how the winds of Chicago have torn him to shreds “reality has too many heads,” he sings, and the cold irons he’s bound for sound a lot like eternity’s shackles. On it Dylan finally looks back, if only because there doesn’t seem much ahead “Behind every beautiful thing,” he sings, “There’s been some kind of pain.” This is the sound of a man sinking beneath his burden of years, and you’re forced to wonder does he fear the darkness, or look forward to it?ĭaniel Lanois’ much-praised hand on production is most evident on stand-out track “Cold Irons Bound,” which surrounds Dylan with drum clamor, some great organ work by Augie Meyers of Doug Sahm fame, and lots of mean guitar licks. The dark and sublimely lovely “Not Dark Yet” is the album’s linchpin and one of the greatest songs Dylan will ever write. Time Out of Mind is an autumnal, and even elegiac, work you can practically hear the shadows gathering. This baby is one long twilight stroll through the graveyard of Dylan’s mind, and he’s not whistling he taking a reckoning, and wondering whether the journey was worth the cost. Dylan sounds lost, desperate even love makes him sick and has him all mixed up, things are disintegrating, and while it’s not dark yet, it’s getting there. But it includes at least one song that stands with the very best of his work and a couple of others that are pretty damn good, and that’s not bad for an artist who was born before America entered WWII.Īnd the album as a whole is noteworthy for its unremittingly dark tone. I still wouldn’t call Time Out of Mind a masterpiece–so far as I’m concerned Dylan stopped producing them in the mid-seventies, at latest.

So if you wanted to call it a resounding comeback, that was fine by me. Sure, Time Out of Mind was a marked–no, make that very marked–improvement on the rather desultory couple of albums he’d released before it. Lots of supposedly sane folks shouted “Masterpiece!” when Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind came out in 1997 Elvis Costello, to pick a seemingly sober-minded celebrity name out of a hat, said, “I think it might be the best record he’s made.”

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