Dylan’s Time out of Mind, the coolest album ever
Upon release, Time Out of Mind was hailed as one of the singer-songwriter’s best albums, and it went on to win three Grammy awards, including Album of the Year in 1998. It also made Uncut magazine’s Album of the Year.
The album features a particularly atmospheric sound, the work of producer (and past Dylan collaborator) Daniel Lanois, whose innovative work with carefully placed microphones and strategic mixing was detailed by Dylan in the first volume of his memoirs, Chronicles, Vol. 1. Despite being generally complimentary to Lanois, especially his work on the 1989 album Oh Mercy, Dylan has voiced dissatisfaction with the sound on Time Out of Mind. He has gone on to self-produce his subsequent albums…
"If the Dylan of World Gone Wrong echoed Flannery O’Connor, the Dylan of Time Out of Mind evokes playwright Samuel Beckett and his spare, unsentimental poetry of despair. He is confident of only one thing: ‘When you think you’ve lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more.’ ['Trying to Get To Heaven']
"Not Dark Yet" is arguably the most celebrated song on Time Out of Mind, and is perhaps the clearest example of John Keats‘ influence on Dylan’s writing; it is even possible that "Not Dark Yet" was grown out of Keats’ own work. In his book, Dylan’s Visions of Sin, Christopher Ricks, a Boston University professor of humanities, draws parallels between "Not Dark Yet" and the Keats poem Ode to a Nightingale. Broken down line for line, "similar turns of phrase, figures of speech, [and] felicities of rhyming" can be found throughout "Not Dark Yet" and the Ode. Ricks also argues that "there is a strong affinity with Keats in the way that in the song night colours, darkens, the whole atmosphere while never being spoken of," just as Keats used winter to color and darken the atmosphere in another poem he wrote, To Autumn. "Dylan’s refrain or burden is ‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.’ He bears it and bares it beautifully, with exquisite precision of voice, dry humour, and resilience, all these in the cause of fortitude at life’s going to be brought to an end by death."
Dylan will be in Ottawa next month. I will attempt to get an interview with him to talk about his Chronicles, Vol. One, and Tarantula, an experimental novel he wrote in the mid-1960s.
