Bob Dylan- Time Out Of Mind

Seven Or So Thoughts On Bob Dylan & Time Out Of Mind

1) Bob Dylan is up there with Miles Davis in the pantheon of greatest musicians who ever lived. Both men were constant searchers and innovators who went through many different phases and personas during their careers, variously making masterpieces, let downs, and comebacks. Dylan in particular has been said to have made comebacks at least once a decade since the end of the 60s, so it seems only fitting my comeback review (after a month or so absence) would be of one of his comeback albums, 1997's Time Out Of Mind.

2) For all the fun you can have with Dylan's mid-60s electric/surreal music, there's a distinct lack of emotional resonance to much of it. As his discography is close to definitive in its moods and forms of expression, you can spend a lifetime discovering him and latching unto certain releases. In my younger days I used to bristle when others would posit Blood On The Tracks as their favorite Dylan album, since Highway 61 Revisited rang much truer to me even though I had no idea what most of it it meant. That was part of my enjoyment, however: the puzzle of it all, the need for interpretation, and Dylan's pervasive wit and urban cool. Now, I embrace his more human and openly emotional albums. Having been through the ringer of (to borrow a phrase) love and theft myself, Time Out Of Mind strikes me as up there with Blood On The Tracks in terms of its humanity and resonance. And excellence.

3) When a friend introduced me to Blood On The Tracks in college, it never occurred to me to wonder about its authenticity. I had no reason to suspect it wasn't taken straight from Dylan's heart until reading his Chronicles book, in which he reflects that an unspecified album (almost certainly Blood On The Tracks) wasn't autobiographical at all, but based on plays by Chekov. This upset me for awhile until I had been through a couple relationships and re-discovered the album, which finally resonated. You see, with Dylan, the point is never authenticity. The point is resonance. 'Simple Twist Of Fate' and 'Shelter From The Storm' give me goosebumps when I even glance at their titles because they resonate so perfectly with things I've thought or felt. Oddly, there has never been much debate as to the theme of Time Out Of Mind, even though it's every bit a relationship album as it is the death/mortality album everyone has always claimed it was. Listen again to 'Love Sick' or 'Cold Irons Bound.' These are not death or disease songs; they recall the uncertainty ofBlonde On Blonde, a record which, like Time Out Of Mind, encompasses a combination of new-love-devotionals and lost-love-laments.

4) Daniel Lanois's production on Time Out Of Mind doesn't sound quite like anything else I've heard. Dylan's voice is wisely kept front and center, with Lanois's subtle reverb/echo treatment lending it a spectral feel, as if Dylan has come back like a ghost a la Obi Wan Kenobi to dispense wisdom. However, there's an odd remove and cool-ness to the instruments that means this record isn't quite as intense as Blood On The Tracks or as alive as Love & Theft. Even the tracks that point to the modern roadhouse R&B/rock sound Dylan has adopted since 2001, most obviously 'Dirt Road Blues', sound a bit muffled and distant, as if someone is retroactively sanding off the distorted edges of the guitars and organs. It doesn't help that there were as many as ten people playing on some of the songs. As a result, 'Cold Irons Bound' paradoxically sounds muffled/distant and suffocating, as if it were recorded in someone's large-but-not-large-enough walk-in closet.

4a) A listen to 'Highlands' on headphones is revelatory. With an organ and electric guitar paired in each stereo channel, on top of the other instruments, this approach, and the track's length, recalls Miles Davis's Bitches Brew. But whereas Teo Marcero and Davis were able to wrangle all of these elements, Lanois and Dylan sound in over their heads. Since Brew was instrumental, it worked; since Time Out Of Mind is ostensibly a vocal focused album, the production and number of musicians can be distracting. Perhaps this explains why the instruments are so muffled and distant sounding, since the mixing of this record and the balancing of all these sounds must've been a nightmare. Also, did 'Highlands' really need to be 16 minutes long? No, but it's an indulgence that works. The flaws of Time Out Of Mind are the sort of flaws that serve to give a record character instead of rendering it less enjoyable. Mind you, 'Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands' and 'Desolation Row' didn't need to be as long as they were, either, but of course, they wouldn't have had nearly the impact they did if they were trimmed.

5) If New Morning is his almost-blindly-optimistic-about-a-new-love and charismatically off-the-cuff album (see 'If Dogs Run Free' and 'One More Weekend' for some of the funnest deep cuts in Dylan history)....if Blood On The Tracks is his newly-pessimistic-about-love and still-witty-but-bitter album ('You're A Big Girl Now' and especially 'Idiot Wind' are, respectively, as defeated and as pissed off as Dylan has ever sounded)....then Time Out Of Mind is like some unexpected sequel to both, written years later about the same characters (now older and changed) by the same person (also older and changed). There's a resignation and passivity to 'Can't Wait' that I find devastating because it hits close to home for me right now. It helps that the lyrics play like a sequel to both 'Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands' (in terms of 'waiting at someone's gate') and 'Tangled Up In Blue' (in the sense of a couple meeting and falling in love over and over).

2a) I suspect that most of the critics and people who read death and mortality in the lyrics of this album do so because it's what is most on their minds. As Dylan's discography encompasses almost the entirety of human experience, from love to loss to absurdity to apathy to nonsense to hope to lust to hatred to belief to fear to etc., it seems to me that his greatest and most lasting works encompass as many of these qualities as possible, and we, as listeners, determine what it all means. To put it another way, Dylan resonates with us because he gives us so much to work with. He openly resists interpretation and wishes the Dylanologists wouldn't waste their lives studying him, but he says these things because he wants people to discover what these songs mean to them, and not to solve the puzzle of what they meant to him when he wrote them. Is 'Not Dark Yet' about his death? I don't know, because to me, it's about my infrequent bouts with depression, pessimism, and apathy.

6) Time Out Of Mind sounds like how I always feel on Sunday nights, especially if I'm drunk and/or have recently broken up with someone.

7) Musically, Love & Theft and Modern Times are better albums. They sound muscular and confident even when they're displaying some vulnerability or sadness. Yet none of Dylan's recent albums ('recent' being a relative term) are as complete as Time Out Of Mind. The former albums are fun and enjoyable listens, but they won't grow on you and grow with you the way an album like this does.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Primer: Tortoise Part 2/Album of the Week: Millions Now Living Will Never Die

I've always wondered something about this album, and I think it gives insight into how Tortoise operates. The liner notes to Millions Now Living Will Never Die reveal that Bundy K. Brown wrote a portion of 'The Taut and Tame', but curiously he was no longer in the band by this point. Instead, sometime between the release of the first album and this, he had left the band, and David Pajo (formerly of Slint) joined. The addition of an honest-to-goodness guitarist changed the Tortoise sound, but at the same time the proposition of Brown writing part of a song on which he doesn't even play speaks volumes for how Tortoise operates.

Furthermore, I recently re-watched the DVD portion of the A Lazarus Taxon boxset and was reminded how democratic the band is. Effectively a faceless band, their de-facto leader has always been perceived as John McEntire, but only because he engineers/produces the band's albums. During concerts--and I'm guessing for the recording of albums--the band switches instruments pretty frequently. All of this gives you the correct impression that Tortoise is not a band where ego ever comes up. Listening to their albums, which are marvels of restraint, you realize that every instrument is used for a reason. Nobody is playing something because they have to always be doing something otherwise they get mad. Members are content to lay off for a bit and let someone else take center stage; not in an improvisational or soloing kind of way, but in a melodic/rhythmic/textural kind of way.

Millions Now Living Will Never Die is an album I have no reservations about calling iconic. From its provocative title to its evocative album cover (schools of fish are a pretty good match for the imagery that the music sometimes creates in your head) to its unique pacing (more on this in a bit), the album frequently and rightly ends up on many best album lists, particularly as a tent pole of the post-rock genre. Clearly I love the album, and while I could conceivably see people not liking it who like post-rock, it's still undeniably one of the landmark releases of said genre. After all, I'm not the biggest fan of either of the Joy Division albums, but they're still landmarks for post-punk. I think you have to hear them to understand the genre.

The first two Tortoise albums are pretty strange when you go back to them. Their self titled debut, I've recently learned, didn't actually have any guitars at all. Instead, they used two bassists in interesting ways to cover up for it. At the same time, Tortoise was a fairly ambient and minimalist release. It does sound like Tortoise, but it's a very different band than the one now in existence. Millions... took a bassist away and added the unique guitar stylings of ex-Slint member David Pajo. Moreover, it's the odd man out in terms of its pacing: it has the least songs of any Tortoise album, and it has the single longest song from any of their albums in 'Djed', which at 20 minutes is more than twice as long as the nearest contender. (Side note to obsessive fans: yes, I know 'Cliff Dweller Society' is 15 minutes long, but it's not on an album). It's an anomaly in the band's discography to be sure, though because Tortoise albums are instrumental and sound the way they do, songs frequently flow together; another simpler way to put it is that Tortoise albums are meant to be listened to as a whole, so suck it up and give it your time, maaaaan.

As I discussed in my review of their debut, Tortoise's genius was to take the first stirrings of post-rock from Talk Talk's Laughing Stock and Slint's Spiderland, combine them together, and add their own spin to the whole thing. While Laughing Stock began from jazz, folk, and even classical music, and Spiderland began from prog rock, math rock, and borderline metal, Tortoise met these origins at a fork in the road, carrying behind them a cartload filled with dub, film music, electronic music, ambient, krautrock, and various world music influences (mainly in their use of vibraphones/marimbas and other assorted percussion). Though Tortoise is underrated, I would argue that it was on Millions Now Living Will Never Die where Tortoise really began to sketch out their own musical idiom and identity.

The album begins with the monolithic 'Djed', which is as good as you've been told. Assuming one were pressed to come up with a list of 'must hear' post-rock songs, I think you'd have to include 'Djed', or at least consider it as a prime contender for essential songs by Tortoise. Allow me to digress for a moment: I've always been puzzled by the title. Did the band mean for it to be taken as "DJ'd", as in a DJ, or pronounced in some weird accent like "duh-jed" or simply "jed" with a silent D?? In retrospect, I assume it was a nod to the way the song, like a proper DJ mixing and seguing songs together, stitches various mini-songs and ideas together in one epic collage. It is indeed a towering achievement for the post-rock genre, one that the listener should pause and savor like a cup of tea.

I must also give the rest of the album its due. 'Glass Museum' is an appropriately titled, immaculately played piece for chamber musicians, adding a nice dole of grit and rock during the section that starts around the three minute mark. 'A Survey' is a calm, ambient, bass driven throwback to the first album, while 'The Taut and Tame' is a peppy, crunchy workout for clattering percussion and distorted guitar. 'Dear Grandma and Grandpa' emerges from a haze of synth washes, and as the album's least guitar-centric, free floating piece, it recalls the more lucid, dreamlike sections of 'Djed' before seguing smoothly into closer 'Along the Banks of Rivers' on the back of a snare drum roll. This song is easily the band's most filmic, and reminds me of something that might be played at the end of a James Bond film from the late 60s, with its spy/noir-ish digital delay guitar, textural Rhodes piano accents, and jazzy, cymbal heavy percussion. For what it's worth, it's also a good song to drop unto the end of mixtapes as a palette cleanser or way to finesse an uneven time ratio between sides A and B.

One of the things I love about certain bands is their ability to combine the experimental and the accessible as well as the grounded/earthy and spacious/spacey. I'm thinking specifically of albums like Miles Davis's Bitches Brew, albums which wrap these seemingly conflicting musical approaches into one giant tapestry of brilliance. I'm not trying to directly compare the two, but Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die is similarly effective as Bitches Brew at challenging the listener with music that contains the above, in equally conflicting and complementary ways. Millions... is a fantastic album, and one that influenced many as well as being among those rare cases where a band is able to distill its influences in such a way to sound wholly original and show us musty ol', jaded music critics that we haven't heard it all before.