Time Out Of Mind

Good album for sitting in a bar with all the regulars trying to cope with the pains of life. Good guitar and the fuzzy vocals are classic Dylan even if he goes pretty deep from the outset. The more blues focused songs were better for me but overall its a consistent ride and a new side of Dylan I hadn't explored yet.

I saw that 16-minute closing track and got scared, but I liked it. Liked the whole thing, really.

Probably not his best but it’s Bob.

I enjoyed the bluesy sound as my Dylan journey continues.

I like Bob, but this isn’t his best

Amazing what Bob can do with a basic blues. Not convinced it's up there with his best, musically or lyrically. But still an hour or so very well spent. 4*

I like Dylan's folksy rock. This is VERY slow and very bluesy, but really easy to listen to. Pretty impressive for your thirtieth album to make this list... part of me wonders how much of the acclaim for this album was simply because it seemed Dylan had lost it before this record came out. It's not something that I'll actively search out and listen to, but it's quite good if you're into blues rock.

I liked the production and the initmate, rehearsal space type of sound

It’s wild to me how much I absolutely cannot tolerate 69s acoustic Bob Dylan music, and yet I absolutely enjoy electric blues Bob Dylan. This album is good enough to make me forgive him for wasting my friend’s money on bringing me to see him in the 90s only for him to stand up on stage completely incoherent. Standing in the Doorway was my favorite on this one. Also I can’t believe I’m as old as I am (OLD) and just now learning that Bob Dylan wrote “To Make You Feel My Love”. 4.5 stars, not sure which way I’ll go. I’m thinking that super long last song may take away me downwards.

While I typically like Bob Dylan, I did not like late 90s Bob Dylan. His voice sounds like he smoked an entire carton of cigarettes before recording this. It reminded me of Tom Waits, and I do not like Tom Waits. The fact it was over an hour just made the experience worse. ⭐️

Oh Bob Dylan. I’m glad you make so many people so happy, I just don’t understand how tho.

I like it fine but I sometimes think the wild reception it got on release was down to nobody thinking he had it in him anymore. But truth was this was just a first step towards the genuine masterpiece that is Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Love Sick - 91 Dirt Road Blues - 87 Standing In The Doorway - 94 Million Miles - 87 Trying To Get To Heaven - 92 'Til I Fell In Love With You - 88 Not Dark Yet - 100 Cold Irons Bound - 93 Make You Feel My Love - 96 Can't Wait - 89 Highlands - 95 Time Out Of Mind - 92

It’s Dylan, so it isn’t a complete dud. But this isn’t any of his best work. If I saw him in concert and he pulled out any of these tracks I’d be happy that I was at the show but surprised it made the set list.

Groan. I thought I'd heard this one already. Apparently not, it's got a darker creepier tone than I tend to associate with Dylan, it's a bit more Tom Waits-y. Turns out I kinda like this. Among my favorite Dylan albums so far. We've got some stressed vocal chords that go well with the blues overtone of the album, but we've got the budget for an over polished production that's sometimes a bit of a clash. Sometimes it's a recipe for beautiful moments. For me, a handful of the tracks are truly special, and I'm thankful the project isn't too long. I'm not a huge blues fan but when I'm in the mood, there's a few names I always go back to, we're talking Muddy Waters, Hound Dog Taylor, a lot of Chess artists. I can now add this Dylan record to the list, it's great for that hazy background music vibe. 3.4/5

“not dark yet” is beautiful. love the lanois production.

One of Dylan’s B+ efforts. A couple of great songs and some filler.

bob, thats better, thats better

Going into this one I didn’t have the highest expectations, (especially considering this is his 30th! album) but this album is really solid.

An actually quite enjoyable Bob album. I’ll listen to it again.

Time Out of Mind? More like I was out of my mind for having to listen to this.

Haven’t listened to this since it came out in 1997. Thought it was decent then, much better than most of his LPs that came out since Blood on the Tracks in 1974, but still way below in quality compared to his 60’s output. This was way better with headphones and following along to the lyrics. The songs are ok to good, but the musicianship/production/vibe were all good to quite good. Sounded great with headphones.

For me, not one of his greatest, but still some sharp lyricism, and I love his voice. Hard to live up to some of his 5-star albums, though, as he set the bar so high.

Good later Dylan all gritty western flecked. Worth a few listens.

733/1001 2026.10.28 😴😴🌗🌑🌑

prefer his voice earlier in his career... nevertheless great listening experience despite being skeptical. wish i was more well versed in what is a cover and not (as with most of his/others songs at the time). adele for make you feel my love >>>

1st song had me captivated but as the album went on it faded to background music, not necessarily a bad thing.

I know people love him and he's suppose to be an incredible lyricist but I HATE his voice and so I can't listen to what he's saying and it's so grating I had to turn it off. Still better than Pink fucking Floyd in any case.

not dark yet really stands out for me but the rest didn’t really do the same. also his voice was very annoying

Day 77 I like the part where she says "You probably want hard boiled eggs" to him Fav track: Not Dark Yet

There is something peculiar about encountering an album for the first time nearly thirty years after it was recorded, particularly when the artist responsible has become such a familiar part of the musical landscape. I knew virtually nothing about Time Out of Mind before this morning. I knew Daniel Lanois had produced it, that it occupied a significant position in Dylan’s later career, and that somewhere within it lay the original version of a song made enormously famous by Adele. Beyond that, I had remarkably few expectations. What I discovered was an album of extraordinary musical imagination and thematic coherence, one which seemed to reveal its underlying preoccupations gradually, almost as though its creator were allowing me to overhear a prolonged argument with himself. The first thing that struck me was the sound. Imagine taking the electric Bob Dylan of Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, stretching him across thirty years, and rebuilding his musical environment in a haunted fairground. The same vocabulary is recognisable: rattling blues, nagging organs, insistent rhythms, guitars that punctuate rather than decorate, and that unmistakable voice riding over everything. But something fundamental has happened to the world these sounds inhabit. They’ve become strangely detached from one another, familiar elements arranged into environments that seem simultaneously antiquated, futuristic and deeply unsettling. On Love Sick, Dylan’s voice sounds almost like a radio broadcast from inside the narrator’s consciousness. The frequency range seems deliberately restricted, giving it a distant, transmitted quality. Meanwhile, the instruments occupy an expansive, ghostly space, their individual sounds floating around him without necessarily seeming to share his acoustic surroundings. The organ has something approaching the Gothic menace of Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand, although Dylan doesn’t quite spill over into Cave’s theatrical world. Instead, the production pushes him towards it, lending a familiar voice an unfamiliar setting. The result is a peculiar combination of psychological intimacy and acoustic distance. We seem to have tuned into a mind already occupied by unhappiness, receiving its transmission from somewhere inaccessible. There’s no introductory explanation, no account of how the narrator arrived in this condition. We simply find him there. That sense of the familiar becoming uncanny develops magnificently in Dirt Road Blues. Here is something recognisably descended from the mid-sixties electric Dylan, but reconstructed into a slightly mechanical, almost fairground version of itself. I had the extraordinary impression of an animatronic Bob Dylan coming to life in a deserted World’s Fair pavilion. The rhythm has a certain jaunty optimism, but the whole enterprise feels subtly wrong, as though the machinery is continuing to perform a routine whose original purpose has been forgotten. It reminded me of the retrofuturist world of Hello Tomorrow!, the Apple television series in which the America of Eisenhower campaign advertisements has somehow acquired the technology of The Jetsons. The flying cars and lunar developments have arrived, but society remains culturally embedded in an imagined 1950s. There’s something about that particular combination of optimism and disappointment which captures the sound of this song. Its mechanical cheerfulness belongs to a world that once anticipated a marvellous future, while Dylan’s narrator is revisiting old roads in search of something that might restore his sense of possibility. It’s nostalgia not simply for a vanished past, but for a future that never arrived. By Million Miles, the music has moved into territory I can only describe as Lynchian. The organ sounds as though Al Kooper has crept out of a crypt. The whole arrangement suggests a band playing somewhere in another room of a strange hotel, its music drifting through corridors, detached from any identifiable source. I thought of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, and of Angelo Badalamenti’s ability to take perfectly familiar American musical materials and make them seem profoundly unreliable. There’s nothing intrinsically supernatural about the instruments or the musical vocabulary. The uncanniness arises from their placement, their relationship to each other, and the sense that the sounds are reaching us from somewhere we cannot quite locate. And increasingly, it becomes apparent that this isn’t merely decorative atmosphere. Lanois’s treatment of the music seems inseparable from Dylan’s lyrical concerns. The record keeps returning to the inability of human beings to connect with one another, to the peculiar emotional distances that can exist between people who are physically close, and to the frustration of possessing an elaborate language of feeling without necessarily being capable of communicating what matters most. There’s a plainspokenness about Dylan on this record that I find fascinating. The hooded enigma, the young man who could use language to dismantle an entire society while remaining personally elusive, seems much less interested in exposing the emptiness of the world than in examining his own. Or, more precisely, the emptiness experienced by the various narrators he inhabits. I’m reluctant to collapse Bob Dylan the artistic creation into Robert Zimmerman the human being, although this album occasionally makes that distinction surprisingly difficult to maintain. What interests me is that the language has become relatively direct without the emotional predicament becoming any simpler. His characters frequently know exactly what they’re feeling. They can describe unhappiness, longing, rejection and exhaustion with extraordinary clarity. Yet that understanding seems to bring them little closer to resolving any of it. Standing in the Doorway introduces an immediate sonic and emotional heft that the first two songs have largely avoided. Dylan’s vocal performance is particularly revealing. I have considerable affection for his much later recordings of American standards, where the ageing voice, stripped of any conventional claim to vocal athleticism, becomes an extraordinarily sophisticated instrument of phrasing and interpretation. The beginnings of that approach are apparent here. He inhabits the melody, allows apparently ordinary statements to accumulate weight, and seems increasingly interested in what his voice can communicate rather than what it can demonstrate. The song’s closing thoughts are remarkable for their resignation about the usefulness of explanation. After spending nearly eight minutes articulating unhappiness, the narrator reaches the conclusion that further words will accomplish nothing. He knows how he feels. He has presumably explored the reasons. None of it changes his condition. The image of the blues wrapped around his head particularly arrested me. It recalled Tangled Up in Blue, but suggested a significant development in Dylan’s treatment of sadness. Blue becomes something almost physical, a web or net capable of entangling and entrapping the sufferer. In the earlier song, the narrator continues to move through relationships, encounters, recollections and changing circumstances. Here, the blues seem to have become the very medium through which the narrator experiences the world, enclosing his consciousness and inhibiting escape. There’s an additional ambiguity in the fact that the blues are both his emotional condition and the musical language through which he expresses it. The means of articulation are also the substance of his entrapment. That musical language repeatedly becomes part of the problem. In Million Miles, a wonderfully odd exchange involving a prospective janitor and the idea of being swept off one’s feet becomes an occasion for the narrator to answer in the inherited vocabulary of rock and roll. The exchange is funny, but also faintly depressing. The characters are speaking in familiar idioms, yet neither seems particularly successful at reaching the other. Their musical and cultural references provide a common vocabulary without necessarily providing genuine communication. The more I listened, the more the album began to acquire a recognisable thematic shape. Roads, doorways, gates, immense distances, difficult journeys and inaccessible destinations recur throughout. These people travel, sometimes enormous distances, but their movement rarely amounts to progress. They remain estranged from one another and, frequently, from any convincing sense of fulfilment. Tryin’ to Get to Heaven deepened this argument considerably. I don’t hear heaven here primarily as the conventional destination awaiting the believer after death. I hear it as an earthbound condition of happiness, release and positivity: freedom from the nebulous blue that has become such an oppressive presence throughout the record. Dylan describes this state through a peculiarly American, musician-inflected vocabulary, borrowing from gospel, folk and blues traditions. His narrator has travelled, experienced, searched and apparently exhausted the possibilities available to him. Yet he remains unable to find whatever would make him whole. Mortality introduces urgency, but not necessarily in the conventional religious sense. Death isn’t the means by which the narrator expects to arrive in heaven. Death may be the thing that prevents him from ever getting there. He wants to reach happiness while he still possesses the breath, energy and life necessary to experience it. I found that a particularly moving proposition from a man who was 56 when he recorded the album. Listening in 2026, we’re aware that Dylan would remain alive and artistically active for nearly another three decades. The man making this record could have had no knowledge of that. He was confronting mortality from within his own life, not from the retrospective perspective of somebody who knew how much time remained. It reminded me of a paradox of ageing that has increasingly interested me. By the time we develop a mature understanding of our abilities and how best to deploy them, the physical capacity to do everything we might wish is necessarily compromised. The knowledge continues to develop even as the available means diminish. It’s something I hear in late-period McCartney, and something analogous can be observed in a footballer such as Lionel Messi, whose understanding of positioning, timing and the most consequential intervention becomes increasingly important as youthful athleticism recedes. But there is an additional cruelty in Dylan’s songs. Knowledge and experience may accumulate without bringing the particular wisdom necessary to discover happiness. One can become extraordinarily sophisticated in understanding the world while remaining bewildered by one’s own emotional needs. And one can run out of time without ever resolving that bewilderment. ’Til I Fell in Love with You contains a verse that seems particularly important in this regard. Images of youthful courtship and ordinary social life suddenly give way to declarations of future wealth, fame and recognition, before the narrator collapses back into uncertainty about what he should do. Here is Bob Dylan, already one of the most celebrated figures in popular music, singing about a young man’s determination to become rich and famous. The dramatic irony is considerable. But I began to wonder whether the more interesting implication was that the ambition itself might have arisen from an inability to establish meaningful private connections. Perhaps the desire to be recognised by the world is an attempt to compensate for the failure to feel properly recognised by another human being. And perhaps the tragedy is that this strategy can succeed completely on its own terms while failing utterly to satisfy the need that originally motivated it. Just because the world is listening doesn’t mean the world can make you feel intimately connected to anybody. There’s a fundamental asymmetry between an artist communicating something intensely personal to millions of listeners and the artist himself experiencing intimacy in return. The audience can feel that it knows Dylan through his work. That doesn’t necessarily provide Dylan, or the characters he portrays, with the experience of being known. I wouldn’t insist upon that as an account of Robert Zimmerman’s private psychology. But as a way of understanding the dramatic predicament presented by the song, it seems particularly suggestive. Not Dark Yet is devastating in its understated treatment of mortality and exhaustion. There’s a recurring image of oppressive heat throughout the album, and here the narrator complains that it’s too hot to sleep. Even daylight has become something unpleasant, incapable of offering either comfort or restoration. The approach of darkness is inevitable, while the remaining light offers little consolation. What particularly interested me was Dylan’s delivery. At times he seems to lean deliberately into the obviousness of his rhymes, almost mocking himself for continuing to organise these enormous emotional questions into conventional verse. It isn’t that he ridicules the suffering. Rather, there’s a faintly ironic awareness of the inadequacy of the apparatus through which he’s expressing it. The language of songwriting can continue supplying neat formal resolutions even when the conditions it describes remain entirely unresolved. One of the song’s most significant observations concerns the difference between apparent movement and actual progress. The narrator’s travelling has not necessarily altered his fundamental position in the world. He may seem to be moving while remaining emotionally fixed in place. That observation seemed to illuminate the album retrospectively. All those roads and journeys, all those thresholds and distances, might represent a lifetime of activity that has done little to resolve the central predicament. The narrator has been places, done things, accumulated knowledge and experience, yet continues to inhabit essentially the same condition. The blues have become not simply the musical accompaniment to his life, but the environment within which it takes place. Cold Irons Bound provided the most striking example of Dylan and Lanois expressing this predicament through musical construction itself. The track begins with a strongly established bass ostinato, boxy percussion and sharp stabs of electric guitar. Dylan declaims over the arrangement with considerable authority, but the music beneath him refuses to behave like the reassuring architecture of a conventional twelve-bar blues. The harmonic changes are unsettling, almost as though the ground is shifting beneath his feet. I was sufficiently intrigued to look up somebody’s attempt at a guitar transcription, whose author openly acknowledged that the changing instrumental voicings could not be adequately captured by ordinary chord symbols. Allowing for the capo position, the recurring harmonic centre sounds as B-flat minor. But the particularly revealing detail is the relationship between the ostinato and the harmonic departures. The repeated bass figure cannot simply continue beneath the changing chords. It breaks apart, an unusual descending movement intervenes, and the ostinato resumes when the music returns to its original harmonic position. This is more interesting than a stable bass line supporting shifting harmonic colours. The source of rhythmic certainty itself is interrupted by the harmonic changes. The result is a blues in which movement repeatedly leads to disruption, followed by reconstruction of the same original predicament. The music doesn’t so much arrive somewhere as re-establish the conditions from which it began. It’s a compelling example of the album’s thematic concerns being embedded in the playing rather than merely illustrated by the production. And then, rather unexpectedly, Make You Feel My Love appears. I knew the song through Adele, of course, but hearing Dylan’s original recording within the developing emotional architecture of this album changes its meaning considerably. After so much longing, failed connection and despair, the narrator suddenly stops describing what the world has withheld from him and begins describing what he can offer somebody else. There’s a significant difference between demanding to be loved and wanting another person to experience one’s love. The narrator offers happiness, devotion and an almost unlimited willingness to act for the other person’s benefit. He doesn’t appear to require an equivalent declaration in return. For the first time, there seems to be a constructive response to the emotional predicament explored throughout the record. Instead of searching the world for something that will make him whole, the narrator offers himself as a source of happiness to somebody else. The arrangement reinforces this impression beautifully. It has an almost hymnal quality, particularly in the lovely suspended organ harmonies as the song fades. The instrument which earlier contributed so much to the album’s Gothic unease and spectral atmosphere becomes warm, consolatory and almost devotional. The grand promises acquire the character of a vow rather than a demand. Yet the song doesn’t establish that the offer is accepted. Its tenderness remains open-ended, and the apparent breakthrough is immediately complicated by what follows. On Can’t Wait, Dylan becomes sour and growling. At first, I heard straightforward impatience. The generosity of the previous song seemed to have evaporated into resentment at the failure of another person to respond as desired. But closer attention to the lyrics suggested something more complicated. The narrator is attempting to recover a former intimacy. He’s wounded by the very person he continues to love, and he doesn’t seem entirely capable of understanding why the attachment persists. Once again, he is standing at a threshold, uncertain whether he can ever cross it. The distinction that emerged was between impatience and the recognition that emotional energy is finite. It isn’t necessarily that the narrator has ceased to be willing to wait. He may simply have reached the point where he no longer knows how much longer he can sustain the effort. The desire remains. The capacity to pursue it indefinitely does not. That brought me back to the earthbound interpretation of heaven. What the narrator seeks is resolution while he remains alive to experience it. He cannot necessarily continue waiting for love, reconciliation or happiness until death overtakes him. Death would be the interruption of the desired resolution, not its fulfilment. There is something broadly human about that predicament. People often want the important business of their lives to reach some meaningful conclusion while they are still present to participate in it. Mortality does not merely threaten existence; it threatens to leave the business of living unfinished. After all this, Highlands is a wonderfully perverse way to conclude the album. Sixteen and a half minutes of slightly exhausted blues, a borrowing from Robert Burns and an extended account of an increasingly awkward conversation with a waitress in Boston were not remotely what I expected from the final track. The Burns material establishes the Highlands as an imagined place of belonging, somewhere the narrator’s heart remains even when he is physically elsewhere. It’s an appropriate extension of the album’s geographical metaphors, with their continual distinction between actual location and emotional destination. But the Boston restaurant episode introduces an almost Beckettian comic sensibility. The conversation proceeds through misunderstandings, evasions, inappropriate responses and occasional absurdities, while achieving remarkably little genuine communication. After an entire album concerned with the inability to connect, we encounter two people conducting an ordinary conversation and failing to establish much common ground. The significant development is that the narrator seems actively complicit in this failure. Throughout the record, Dylan’s characters have frequently appeared to be victims of emotional circumstances beyond their control. They long for intimacy, experience rejection, travel enormous distances and pursue happiness without ever reaching it. Their suffering can seem almost externally imposed. In Highlands, however, the narrator’s own evasiveness becomes impossible to ignore. He jokes, deflects, misunderstands and sometimes appears wilfully unhelpful. Another person is attempting to engage him, however awkwardly, and he seems scarcely capable of participating without making the encounter more difficult. This doesn’t mean that the waitress is offering the profound intimacy he has spent the preceding songs seeking. Ordinary conversation is not the same thing as emotional fulfilment. But it does suggest that his failure to connect may not be entirely something that happens to him. His own habits of communication, his emotional distance, his evasions and perhaps even his idealisation of an inaccessible elsewhere may be implicated in the problem. The album’s conclusion therefore complicates everything that has preceded it. Instead of resolving loneliness through some grand declaration of love, transcendence or acceptance, Dylan ends with a distinctly comic demonstration of the difficulty of dealing with another human being. The man who has spent the record longing for connection doesn’t always know what to do when somebody actually talks to him. I find that considerably more interesting than a conventionally tragic ending. It also makes the album’s relationship with Dylan’s artistic identity particularly intriguing. I have sometimes felt that there are two different presences in his work: Bob Dylan, the enormous cultural construction, and Robert Allen Zimmerman, the man who must live within it. I noticed that some songwriting metadata uses his birth name, although I wouldn’t attach an artistic explanation to a variation in credits without better evidence. More interesting is the way different songs seem to permit different degrees of distance between the performer and the emotional material. At moments, the familiar Dylan persona seems almost absent. At others, particularly during the comic evasions of Highlands, something closer to the old mischievous, inscrutable Dylan reappears. But perhaps the distinction between the artistic persona and the private individual is impossible to maintain after so many decades. A mask worn for an entire creative life can become part of the means through which intimate truths are expressed, without those truths necessarily being straightforward autobiography. And this is where Daniel Lanois’s contribution becomes so important. The comparison that kept returning to me was Nigel Godrich’s relationship with McCartney on Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. Both producers seem capable of providing a strong independent artistic intelligence to musicians who have accumulated enough authority and experience to become almost entirely self-directing. What does artistic freedom mean without productive constraint? An artist who can do virtually anything may no longer encounter the resistance necessary to reconsider familiar habits. Godrich challenged McCartney partly by stripping away elements of his established working process. Lanois, by contrast, constructed an elaborate sonic environment around Dylan. The means differ, but the potential artistic function is similar: the introduction of another intelligence capable of challenging the artist’s assumptions and creating conditions in which unfamiliar possibilities can emerge. Throughout this album, the production makes the familiar strange without destroying its identity. Dylan remains recognisably Dylan. The blues remain recognisably the blues. Yet the relationships between singer, instruments, harmony and acoustic space keep changing our understanding of what those familiar materials can accomplish. The result is an album whose production is not a decorative layer sitting above the songs, but a substantial part of their meaning. I also found myself returning to a long-held interest in the nature of mature artistry. I’ve sometimes described an artist as someone capable of seeing themselves, or their work, as the world encounters them, and deliberately adjusting their presentation accordingly. There’s a related progression from the happy accidents of juvenilia, when a young creative discovers that something they’ve produced is effective without fully understanding why, towards intentional artistry, where that effectiveness becomes something they can recognise, examine and deploy consciously. But the process never really finishes. Artistic judgement develops through repeated acts of observation, interpretation and adjustment, and the method of making those judgements can itself change through experience. That seems pertinent to Dylan here. The ageing voice is not simply an inferior version of a younger instrument. It belongs to a musician whose understanding of what can be accomplished with that instrument has continued to develop. The contrast with the verbally exuberant young Dylan is fascinating. The singer who could once fill a song with extraordinary torrents of imagery now seems capable of achieving equal or greater emotional consequence through relatively plain statements, carefully placed phrases and an almost conversational acknowledgement of the limits of language. That doesn’t mean every limitation automatically becomes an artistic virtue. A deteriorating voice can simply be a deteriorating voice. But an artist sufficiently aware of their available resources can develop new ways of making those resources consequential. Dylan’s later recordings of American standards make this particularly apparent, and Time Out of Mind sounds to me like an important stage in the development of that interpretive maturity. One of the things I came to admire most during the listening was the absence of any compulsion to make everything grand. Even when addressing mortality, the language can be wry, ordinary, occasionally almost flippant. The narrator sometimes seems faintly embarrassed by the business of organising despair into rhyme. And Highlands finally allows the emotional seriousness of the entire album to coexist with something approaching absurd comedy. That mixture is much closer to the contradictions of lived experience than an uninterrupted procession of solemn pronouncements would have been. What began as fascination with an uncanny production gradually developed into recognition of an exceptionally coherent artistic conception. The distant voices, drifting instruments, unstable harmonies, constrained musical cycles and peculiar acoustic spaces all seem to contribute to an album about people who cannot quite reach one another. The language is often intimate, but the relationships remain distant. The narrator travels while standing still. He searches for happiness while wondering whether sufficient time remains to discover it. He imagines public recognition as a substitute for private understanding. He offers unconditional devotion, then discovers that his capacity to wait may have limits. Finally, he encounters another human being and turns the possibility of communication into a faintly ridiculous exercise in mutual incomprehension. There is no need to insist that these are all chapters in the life of one individual. The coherence emerges from the repeated concerns and the different ways Dylan examines them, not from the construction of an artificially continuous autobiography. Nor do I think the record is simply about death. Mortality provides its urgency, but living provides its substance. The narrators aren’t merely contemplating the end. They’re struggling with the possibility that they may never discover how to achieve what they want before the end arrives. The album’s great achievement, for me, is that it makes these concerns audible in the music itself. The sonic environment is not merely haunted because Lanois enjoys unusual textures. It sounds haunted because the familiar materials of American popular music have been made to express dislocation, frustrated recognition and emotional estrangement. And Dylan, with that gloriously worn voice, occupies the centre of this environment while sometimes appearing almost detached from it. I began the morning knowing virtually nothing about the album and ended it having spent considerably longer examining its music, imagery and implications than I expected. It sustained that attention magnificently. Indeed, the final track made me reconsider aspects of the preceding ten songs rather than merely supplying a conclusion. There are records which impress through their individual songs, others through their performances, and others through the imagination of their production. Here, all three are working towards a coherent but unresolved conception of human experience. It’s a record about disconnection that communicates with astonishing intimacy, about movement that repeatedly fails to produce arrival, and about mortality that is frightening principally because there remains so much living to be done. And it ends, wonderfully, with a man who seems incapable of having a straightforward conversation with a waitress. I can find very little here that I would want changed. More importantly, I can imagine returning to it repeatedly, not simply to enjoy its atmosphere or revisit particular songs, but to discover what else its strange, haunted world might reveal. That is a rare achievement, and one that fully deserves the highest judgement I can give it.

Love ya, Bob. You should have hung up that guitar in the '80s.

Love Bob Dylan, hated this

Yeah bluesy fun

I understand that Bob Dylan is a classic and he may have even changed the face of white boy music and who can pass for a singer, but you do not have to listen to him. He is in every gas station, every cracker barrel, every movie background where the road gets vaguely dusty. And listening to him now, in this world that has felt the affects of Bob Dylan in music, feels like it's been overplayed since every other artist sounds a little like him. I could just listen to Jack Johnson and at least he doesn't sound like hes gargling nails.

Dylan. Enough said.

Totally fine but not my favorite thing he’s done

If you’re going to add a late career Dylan record have the decency to at least make it his Christmas record. Jeez.

So this is considered Bob Dylan's big comeback. I'll be honest, even though I'm a huge Dylan fan, I only really know his 60s and 70s output, and this is considered to be his amazing comeback album after a really awful run in the 80s and early 90s. I'm not familiar with this era of his music at all, so I guess I just don't have the proper context to appreciate why this is so good. Listening to this on its own without ever having heard all the supposedly awful music that came before it makes this sound pretty underwhelming.

a cold and wet day subtle light shimying through rust a cracked voice, beauty

Dylan going whiskey blues route with modern production. Surprising, enjoyable.

Lovesick

meh, I don't like blues, but the guitar in the last song is quite beautiful

Hot take #1: I don’t like Bob Dylan. Hate his nasal voice. I know and totally understand that he is a very important character in the history of music, and his legacy is unmatched, but even though I tried multiple times at different stages of my life, I still can’t. His music doesn’t stick with me. 2/5. It’s my personal opinion. I don’t discredit what he did, but it’s just not for me. Love Sick: 2 Dirt Road Blues: 2 Standing in the Doorway: 2 Million Miles: 2 Tryin' to Get to Heaven: 2 Til I Fell in Love with You: 2 Not Dark Yet: 2 Cold Irons Bound: 2 Make You Feel My Love: 2 Can't Wait: 2 Highlands: 2

I gave it a 2 listens as a non Bob guy and I enjoyed some of the soundscape and a couple of the songs. It's all storytelling and for me its a different kind of listening experience but not something thats super engaging. Too much of the same blues. Will go back for hard boiled eggs!

Quit whilst you’re ahead

Couple of good blues songs but largely uninspired compared to old Dylan

Great album as always, love bob dylan. My love for dylan started with the movie “a complete unknown” and ive been a fan ever since. I knew abt him before the movie but was never into his music that much. Solid album, not my fav really good songs tho Fav : Standing in the doorway Rating 7.5:10

I definitely appreciate Bob, but I truly struggle with his later stuff. It always feels like we're giving him credit for it being so good *for his age*. Not that it's so good that it stands on it's own in a vacuum. Blood and the Tracks, Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61, these albums stand on their own. This one is really good for an artist 25 years past his prime.

Maybe not the strongest of Bob Dylan's stuff, but still not without merit. Compared to what I've already heard, you can tell the cigarettes have really affected Mr Dylan's voice, as he sounds a lot scratchier than before. Here, his voice becomes more suited towards the swampier side of the blues, and indeed this is where the album shines, however I'm not particularly a fan of how the vocals are processed here, as a lot of the time they feel separate from everything and just slapped onto the instrumentals rather than being properly mixed in. Maybe it's to do with the way his voice sounds, but there's still something a little off about it. Overall, a good album to be sure, yet not great enough to be saved into my library.

I love Bob Dylan's "raspy voice" era. His timbre became even more unique over the years, and this is a great album—very accessible for anyone who has never listened to Dylan before. 4 stars.

Zzzzzzzzzzzz

Not bad for Bob Dylan. Nothing stuck for me.

Would this be a significant album of Bob Dylan wasn’t the artist? It’s certainly not a good one knowing he is.

I haven’t really listened to much Dylan past the 70s, so this sounded completely different from what I’m used to from him. The whole album has a really bluesy feel and just sounds sad. Not in a big dramatic way, more like he’s tired of everything. “Standing in the Doorway” caught my attention because some of the guitar reminded me of the melody from “Can’t Help Falling in Love" by Elvis. “Cold Irons Bound” was probably one of my favorites too. I also somehow never knew Dylan wrote “Make You Feel My Love.” All the covers I've heard are way better. There were definitely parts I liked, but this dragged too much for me. “Highlands” being almost 17 minutes was just too damn long. By then I was ready for the album to be over.

Like the folk and blue mix.

Not my favourite Dylan period, or album (I'd never listened to it before). However, Make You Feel My Love makes up for a number of faults.

not even giving this a proper review. stop putting bob dylan on this list im SICK!!!! ಄ albums remaining: 936 ಄ albums I agree with being on the list: 67 ಄ albums I would consider for my list: 33 ಄ albums I would not include on my list: 120

3.7

This was slightly listenable because he sounded like tom waits and I found that funny. But any sense of minuscule enjoyment was lost within the last tracks never ending ever wandering unnecessary masturbatory self important…oh no! I think I’m becoming Bob now.

Remember when Dylan pushed boundaries? Not anymore.

Different than expected, but in a good way.

Bob Dylan really ran out of shit to say. Late-career albums from once-popular musicians don't belong on this list.

Great instruments, amazing lyrics, thank you Bob, but I also struggle with the voice

Interesting to hear some Dylan which is not from his iconic 60s era, so I hope reviewers will listen with fresh ears. For me this this is more of the same for Dylan. It's a little more elaborate and more highly produced and polished, but I have about the same opinion of this that I do his earlier classic work, although the vocals are more gravelly and the lyrics are much less florid and more surface level. To me that's a good thing, his poetry I have always found baffling, and obscure for obscurity's sake and more than a little the emperor has no clothes. Here I understand what he's trying to say without someone having to give me extensive explanations. Not Dark Yet is pretty great. Highlands sucks though, especially the whole drawing subplot, so together they even out to a wash.

Not my favorite 2nd act Dylan album (or 3rd or 4th or 5th act, etc. depending on how you’re looking at his career) but certainly a definitive one. I dig Lanois’s spacey production but they serve the sad, haunting slower songs, which are among BD’s very best, than the blues rockers. Whatever, this shit is iconic and Bob was born to be an aging singer-songwriter.

I never understood bob Dylan fans. But there is something here that is unique. The early vocals with the way he builds the songs just works. Im starting to understand his legacy

The start of Dylan’s third — and current — legendary run.

My new favorite Dylan album. A great blend of lyrics and blues.

Son oeuvre maîtresse des années 90. China a fait que sa mère me l'achète en vinyles pour mon dernier anniversaire.

ouiiiiii plus je l'écoute par contre, moins je le préfère vs love and theft, mais c'est sans contredit un incontournable dans la phase '90-'00 du barde. Je l'aime même si Dylan l'aime moins et s'est brouillé avec Lanois. Highlands un peu trop long avec le bout qu'il dessine une serveuse et la serveuse aime pas ça... les tounes de 16 minutes c'est un peu trop pour moi souvent. Ça reste un beau parallèle avec sa Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Je suis pas encore sûr qu'il mérite le prix Nobel de littérature, mais ce que je découvre au fil des ans, c'est à quel point Dylan sait s'entourer constamment du meilleur band dans le monde en le renouvelant à chaque 5-10 ans. Il est là à mon sens son vrai talent.

Excellent Bob. En effet tellement un bon backing band. Bien bluesy par moment sans se tanner. Je pense que c'est mon préféré de Bob date, ce qui est surement une hérésie pour les dylanites.

Late era Bob Dylan is tough. The engineering and mixing on this are album are superb. I love the instrumentals and I don't mind the downtempo beats. The vibes are pretty great overall. Excellent songwriting of course. But, man, it's hard to listen to his vocals. They sort of ruin (for me at least) what would otherwise be a fantastic album.

When will it end?! How many fucking albums does this guy have? On this one, from 1997, he's already starting to sound like an old man, and thankfully seems to have lost the energy needed to abuse a harmonica at random points in a song. That prevents this from getting 1 star, because it's more boring than actively bad. Listening to some artists who are poor singers, I sometimes think that a particular song would be great if someone else covered it. But somehow Bob Dylan's voice is so awful that even when one of his songs is in that situation it's hard to see that it could be good when sung by someone competent. Case in point, the song "Make you feel my love" is beautiful sung by Adele, but if I had never heard her cover I would not in a million years have imagined it could be so great. Such is the power of Bob Dylan

Classic and perfect

Umm, what exactly was this? This was the sleepiest blues rock album I've ever listened to. If I'd have had the fifth of whiskey this album requires, I would have been asleep by the time I got to "Highlands" and it would have put me right into REM sleep. Dear Lord. This is what happens when you smoke, kids. I've never been a big fan of Dylan's, mostly because I despise mythologizing and people jumping on the bandwagon just because someone else says they're good. This one is not pushing me to like him any more. My Rating: 2/5

Not bad. Three stars…

Grand classique encore

J'ai déjà oublié à peu près toutes les chansons de l'album.

This is the old Dylan, and the blues runs through all of it. Probably the bluesiest thing he's ever recorded. His voice isn't beautiful, and by this point it's cracked and worn, but it's unmistakable, and the damage suits these songs. The whole record moves at the pace of time passing. Perfect for a long evening with a book.

Love the darker band sound. The rough voice fits the storytelling really well here.

Enjoyed this album a lot more than I thought. Very relaxing and never knew that Make You Feel My Love came from Bob Dylan

Whilst this is lyrically still strong his voice has complelely gone by this point, which is a shame as im a huge Dylan fan.

I quite liked it. It's like a sane Captain Beefheart album

Feels very Neil Young, not a bad thing. Solid

I thought I'd enjoy this more. Guess there's not always a guarantee w the Greats

The voice of truth. It’s calm, clear, and stands in front of the music. You hear every word.

Albums. Not the concept but the physical medium. Large format, perhaps impractically so, featuring great (or not great) art, often times lyrics and most importantly for my younger self - credits. At a time when information was far more constricted staring into the front and back of an album was sometimes the only real info you could find out about a band. Members names, who played what, when and where. And as I clocked for the first time while staring at the back of U2s Unforgettable Fire - the producer(s). I had seen Brian Eno's name before in relation to Talking Heads and that mind splitting album he did with David Byrne but there was a second name listed - Daniel Lanois. Just as that whole album was shrouded in mystery to my 14 year old mind it seemed maybe this mysterious individual had something to do with that. Little did I know then laying on my bed trying to make sense of Elvis Presley and America while a reread the contents of the back sleeve that I was beginning what would be a life long relationship with this mysterious Canadian. I didn't really get Bob Dylan as a kid. The 80s were not a kind to Bob so what I has hearing on the radio was a mixture of the same old hits and new songs that were of the wheezing cat skinnin variety. But then someone played me Bringing It All Back Home when I was in college. And wow. It struck me. I think It's Alright, Ma (I'm only Bleeding) should be required listening to be granted a high diploma before even the President must stand naked... These two artists combined forces in 1997. By that time I had worked my way through Dylan's catalog. I had a vague sense of what was going on. Danny lanois had produced multiple great albums (including perhaps Emmylou Harris' crowning achievement a couple years earlier, a Grammy winning Neville brothers album featuring three Dylan tracks and a prior good to great Dylan album). Bit this album was something else entirely. A brilliant album representing an evolution of a singular artist. At their heart the songs are simple but the gauzy layers make them feel like the lyrics are being broadcast to the cosmos. Words are stated clearly but remain elusive. There is sonic depth caught in the layers of sound that matches the gravel in Bob's voice. An achievement at any age but that this is a late era work by an artist that had already been doing it for 35 years is miraculous.

No more Bob Dylan please

Awesome!

Why so much Bob Dylan I will never understand

This isn’t terrible but it does get rather boring after awhile. I was completely zoned out after abt the sixth song.

Highlights: Love Sick, Standing in the Doorway, Dirt Road Blues and ‘TIL I Fell in Love With You. 3.5

Don’t care that he is considered legendary…I cannot listen to this disc.

I keep wanting to like Dylan. I keep trying to like Dylan. Can't do it. A 2 just on reputation.

Quite boring honestly... sounds sound too similar, I guess the lyrics are the defining feature here but they weren't doing anything for me.

Not familiar with this album, other than one hit. Slow rolling, bluesy and soulful. Not bad.

I know this album got several awards but Bob's voice is just a talk on this album. Obviously we'll written songs but the sound is just sounding like one dirge after another. Lacks emotion and depth.

How many times in his career has Bob Dylan been counted out? Dismissed as a relic, maligned, misunderstood, mocked… only to come back fighting. Showing the world that he’s still vital, influential, prominent… completely unaffected by criticism, indifference, misunderstood and under appreciated? Probably as many decades as he’s been making music and as many different voices and characters he has embodied in those 60 some odd years. Time Out Of Mind came out during one of those times when most people thought he was done. The album was recorded in February of 1997. Toward the end of May, Dylan was hospitalized when he began experiencing chest pains. He was diagnosed with histoplasmosis pericarditis. He had to cancel a European tour, spent most of the summer recuperating and by August he was touring again and released this album in September. Unthinkable fortitude for most men his age. Not only did he make a miraculous recovery, but Time Out Of Mind is widely regarded and ranked amongst his greatest albums and one of the greatest comebacks in rock and roll history. It revitalized his career and was considered his best album since the 1975 album Blood On The Tracks and won Grammies for album of the year, best contemporary folk album and best male rock vocal performance, not to give credence to a Grammy award, but sometimes, something is so undeniably good, they get it right. Dylan also performed the lead single Love Sick at the ceremony, seemingly unfazed when a shirtless man appeared by his side with “Soy Bomb” written across his chest and dancing in a convulsive, flailing manner while Dylan turned his back on him and let loose a gritty guitar solo until security could deal with the intruder. Time Out Of Mind is dark and melancholic in mood, but also offers a light at the end of the tunnel. Like a journey through the heart of darkness to salvation. Every song is vital and creates a narrative without exhibiting a purposeful concept. It explores the inevitability of death, Tryin’ To Get To Heaven and Not Dark Yet, while acknowledging the experiences that validate the journey, Til I Fell In Love With You and Make You Feel My Love (which became a big hit when it was covered by artists like Adele, Garth Brooks and others. The album ends with the nearly 17 minute epic, Highlands inspired by Scottish poet Robert Burns. The sometimes melancholic, sometimes comedic (the interaction with a waitress in particular) and satirical song explores the same themes as a journey through life, love, aging, feeling disassociation with the modern world with a metaphorical heaven or paradise represented by the Scottish Highlands as a symbol of peace and salvation. Time Out Of Mind is the easiest 5 I have handed out so far. 5+

Bob Dylan, 7eme album =>1/5 Enfin c’est le dernier !