Records: Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind

By Kamran Jaradizadeh

Bob Dylan insists that he is not a poet, and, for the most part, I agree. I mention this only to qualify the comparison that I am about to make between Dylan and William Shakespeare. It's a mysterious fact that Shakespeare, after having written more than 30 of the greatest plays in any language, retired to the countryside and did not write for the last ten years of his life. Why? Well, what would you write after The Tempest?

Until the release of Time Out of Mind, it seemed that Bob Dylan had reached popular music's version of that point. But it's clear that the seven-year absence of original Dylan material was the sort of "career-slump" that Quentin Tarantino helped John Travolta make cool. Call it a meditative silence.

Time Out of Mind is the product of that meditation. It's a ghostly collection of lonely wanderings, and is Dylan's best work since 1975's Desire. The sound achieved on Time Out of Mind is unlike any other that Dylan's produced. His earliest albums were each recorded in a few days, while his more recent albums were disappointingly over-produced and ring somewhat hollow in the ear.

This time around, Dylan and producer Daniel Lanois have conspired to produce a sound that is at once authentic and complex. This new sound is stark; Dylan calls it "spooky." The beginning of "Love Sick" sounds more like late Tom Waits than like anything off of Dylan and Lanois' 1989 collaboration, Oh Mercy. By the end of Time...,we realize that Dylan himself has changed. The result is a wonderfully murky sound from another time and place, from deep within the mind of the greatest songwriter of our time.

These days, with the Rolling Stones and god knows who else on tour, we are rightly skeptical of yesterday's rock stars turning old tricks to pad their retirement funds. I think Dylan refreshingly differs from acts like the Stones in that he is himself skeptical of his relevance to today's scene. He said recently, "We try and we try and we try to be who we were--sooner or later you come to the realization that we're not who we were." The last song, "Highlands" is a 17 minute, rambling version of that very realization, and it ranks with Dylan's best. Near the beginning of the song,Dylan sings, "I wish someone would come and push back the clock for me." One remarkable moment later, Dylan tells us, "The party's over and there's less and less to say / I got new eyes, everything looks far away."

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