Bob Dylan doesn't exactly need much of a shelf to hold his Grammy awards. During his thirty seven year recording career he has won three Grammys: one in 1979 for his vocal performance on Gotta Serve Somebody; one in 1991 (when during the show he sang a buzzing and much talked about version of Masters of War as the Gulf War was just beginning) for life time achievement; and one in 1993 for Best Contemporary Folk Album on World Gone Wrong. For his Time Out of Mind to win the Best Album of the Year award he faces the difficult task of somehow beating the more popular Babyface and Paula Cole not to mention fellow icon Paul McCartney.
Nonetheless Time Out of Mind is an impressive work from an artist whose catalog of work remains vital and inspiring. TOOM with its old time blues backdrop underneath a contemporary Daniel Lanois production is one of Dylan's better sounding CDs. The overall texture is simple with a variety of instruments (most notably Augie Meyer's spooky organ) complimenting Dylan's bluesy vocals. The CD is thematically linked through all eleven songs which share some common themes in Dylan's work. The notion of time being a concept as concrete and elusive as a place is one Dylan has contemplated throughout his career. While a song like Tangled Up in Blue takes place in the past present and future, songs on TOOM all have the singer stuck with his present which has been forever colored by relationships and events in the past, while he sees a bleak future which is as inevitable as his present and past.
The song on TOOM which sounds most like a "traditional" Dylan song is Tryin To Get to Heaven (Before they Close the Door). The countryish melody and sometimes nonsensical lyrics sound straight from the Basement Tapes. The motif suggests similarities to Knockin on Heaven's Door. But the theme of a drifting and scarred soul link it ever so tightly with the other ten songs on the CD. "Every day your memory grows dimmer, it doesn't haunt me like it did before. I've been walking through the middle of nowhere, tryin to get to heaven before they close the door." The next verse dredges up images of Americana, placing the singer in Missouri on his way to New Orleans thinking about a woman, Miss Mary Jane, in Baltimore. "People on the platforms, waitin' for the trains. I can hear their hearts a-beatin' like pendulums swinging on their chains."
Despite his claims, whatever (or whoever) the singer is trying to forget and leave behind remains with him. "You broke the heart that loved you. Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore.""When you think that you've lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more." He longs for heaven not for any redemption but for release from his feelings and memories. "Gonna sleep down in the parlor and relive my dreams. I close my eyes and I wonder, if everything is as hollow as it seems."
The next song, 'Til I fell in Love With You sounds like a long lost blues classic. "My nerves are exploding and my body's tense, I feel like the whole world got me pinned up against the fence." The answer this singer is seeking isn't so much of a release but an explanation as to his loss. "I've been hit too hard, I've seen too much. Nothing can heal me now but your touch. I just don't know what I'm gonna do, I was all right ''til I fell in love with you." The singer not only regrets losing her, he regrets ever knowing her.
The aftermath of those feelings continue in Not Dark Yet, the type of song that only Dylan seems capable of writing. It isn't so much the loss of a woman that saddensand she passed by. My love for her has taken such a long time to die." What makes the vocals on this song different from the others is a harshness, an anger (at her? at himself?) that is rooted not so much in regret but in disappointment and confusion. The pinnacle line from the entire set is: "It's such a sad thing to see beauty decay. It's sadder still to feel your heart turn away" summing up the overriding feeling of the writer who isn't so much heartbroken as broken spirited. The feeling of loss goes beyond the loss of a relationship ("I'm going to remember forever the joy we've shared. Looking at you on my bended knee. You've no idea what you did to me."); it's a loss of connection with himself ("I'm out of control like the universe has swallowed me whole"), and the world around him ("There's too many people too many to make calls. I thought some of them were friends of mine, I was wrong about 'em all.") It's the loss of his past, and feeling so lost in the present that the longing for the future isn't so much a hope for anything better, it's just that the future is a different time and thus place than the current world. To get there is to continue down the road trying not to be distracted by keeping the concept of time out of mind.
Even the CD's "love song" has an edge of darkness to it. Make You Feel My Love is a simple ballad with simple lyrics. Unlike any of the other songs, the singer is actually singing to another individual. Yet it clearly is in the ashes of all that has come before and the person the song is about isn't the same person as before. "When the evening shatters and the stars appear and there is no one there to dry your tears. I could hold you for a million years, to make you feel my love." Simple in its straightforward language, the edge comes from the words "make you feel" as if the singer is past trying to impress, inspire, and court his love. This is a proposal resigned to its black and white nature. "Though storms are raging on the rolling sea and on the highway of regrets. Though winds of change are blowing wild and free, you ain't seen nothing like me yet."
But by the next song the singer is back to thinking of the way things were in the past. A sense of impatience gives way to desperation. "You understand that my heart can't go on beatin' without you. Well your loveliness has wounded me, I'm reeling from the blow. I wish I knew what it was that keeps me loving you so." Unlike the other songs, this singer seems to almost be looking at things with an ironic eye. "It's mighty funny, the end of time has just begun. I thought somehow that I would be spared this fate. I don't know how much longer I can wait." Coming to terms with his own vulnerability, he places the blame squarely on her shoulders. "If I ever saw you comin' I don't know what I might do. I'd like to think I could control myself but it isn't true. That's how it is when things disintegrate."
The CD appropriately concludes with the sprawling Highlands a sixteen minute opus full of dry wit and mundane scenes of daily events. "Windows were shaking all night in my dreams. Everything was exactly the way that it seems. Woke up this morning and I looked at the same old page, same old rat race, life in the same old cage." The singer plays a Neil Young song only to have someone tell him to turn it down. He ends up in an empty Boston restaurant where he flirts with the waitress. "I said, 'Tell me what I want' she says 'You probably want hard boiled eggs.' I say, 'That's right bring me some.' She says, 'We ain't got any, you picked the wrong time to come.' Then she says, 'I know you're an artist, draw a picture of me.' I said, 'I would if I could but I don't do sketches from memory.'" He escapes the restaurant only to end up in a park where he watches "young men with the young women lookin so good" and admits he wishes he could turn back the clock and be like them again. Highlands completes the journey from the one who was walking through streets that were dead and now ends up with his heart on a higher plain. The journey has confused him and will continue to confuse him but through the journey he has accepted that in his heart. "The sun is beginning to shine on me, but it's not like the sun that used to be. The party's over and there's less and less to say. I got new eyes, everything looks far away." The dark brooding of all the interconnected lines from the songs gives way to the expression of those feelings. He longs to be in the highlands, and he still has a ways to go before he figures out how to get there, but the vision of what that means will get him through his current state of feelings.
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Back when I was on my secret government mission I only brought one tape with me, a bootleg concert of Dylan in Australia. I listened to that tape over and over and there was something extremely reassuring in the voice of one who was as confused about his feelings as I was about my own yet found redemption in sharing that with his audience. On Time Out of Mind it is the heartfelt urgency and conviction that powers each song. The writer /singer needs to express himself through these songs. There is not a forced or unconvincing moment on the entire CD. Though the songs are full of the blues, of feelings of loss not only from someone near to the heart but with a connection to the world at large, it's the resiliency of spirit one is left with after listening to the CD. That it has connected with the public more than any other Dylan CD in a long time suggests expressing the heart may have been emotionally difficult but artistically cathartic.
NEXT WEEK: AN ANALYSIS OF HANSON'S MIDDLE OF NOWHERE