(***) September 30, 1997. 30th Studio Album.
Haunting. That’s the first word I can think of to describe the aptly titled Time out of Mind, the beginning of what I consider Dylan’s third (or maybe 4th, 5th?) and most likely final phase of his career and life. This is a high-quality release, with some of Dylan’s best songs (“Not Dark Yet,” “Love Sick”) and another epic, “Highlands,” along the lines of his earlier “Brownsville Girl” or “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Lyrically the album is filled with angry lost-love songs, with the chilling line, ”Don’t know if I saw you, if I would kiss you or kill you” stands out, although this mood is reversed by the simply beautiful “Make You Feel My Love,” which became a hit for many other artists, including Billy Joel, Adele, Garth Brooks and Kelly Clarkson. Among the drawbacks of the album for me is that Dylan is in a talking-blues mode, where he’s telling a story rather than singing it, and musically it’s filled with mostly slower, repetitive tempos provided by his touring band, with a looping process by producer Daniel Lanois that sounds like it was recorded digitally in a cave. But that’s nitpicking. The biggest flaw of the album is its length, at close to 75 minutes on CD (although it was released on vinyl as a double album). It’s really hard to focus on all of the songs in this style for that long, even though most are stellar. Four of these songs could have been left off and added to a future “Bootleg Collection,” which would have made the album breathtaking. Nonetheless this is among his many so-called “comeback ”projects, and coincidentally, he even won three Grammys for it on the same night his son Jakob’s band, the Wallflowers, won as well, something I’m sure made the Grammy producers delighted.