Time Out of Mind

"Love and Theft" When we last left the ever-confounding saga that is Bob Dylan's now-superhuman recording career, he'd reunited with producer Daniel Lanois, with whom he cut 1997's Time Out of Mind, his most coherent and appealing collection in nearly a decade. Now the still-reigning prince of mu...	Modern Times At a time when the majority of those his age are drifting into retirement, 65-year-old Bob Dylan has put the capper on a three-record run that ranks with the best in his storied, 44-album career. Like Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft before it, Modern Times is a rootsy, blues-...	Blood on the Tracks Inevitably, when critics praise a new Dylan album, they label it the "best since Blood on the Tracks," and with good reason. Inspired by a crumbled marriage, and recorded after a tour with the Band had apparently re-ignited his creativity, Blood is among Dylan's masterpieces. The...	Highway 61 Revisited Dylan was virtually gushing great songs when this masterpiece arrived in the summer of 1965. From the epochal opening of "Like a Rolling Stone" through the absurdly apocalyptic closer, "Desolation Row," his command of surrealistic language was daring and amazing. As a vocalist, h...	Bringing It All Back Home "You sound like you're having a good old time," a purist Dylan fan is spotted telling the artist in the documentary Don't Look Back just after the release of this, his first (half-)electric album. He certainly does. Updating Chicago blues forms with hilarious, tough lyrics--in fa...
Blonde on Blonde	Oh Mercy The '80s was a particularly shifting, uncertain decade for Bob Dylan's creative voice. But he capped it off with his first album of all-original material in several years and his best since Infidels. A lot of the credit for Oh Mercy's distinctive appeal has been given to produc...	Desire	World Gone Wrong With his songwriting muse on pause, Bob Dylan spent the mid-'90s recording old folk and blues standards with just himself, a harmonica, and an acoustic guitar. Good As I Been to You was the first effort. For the follow-up, World Gone Wrong, he went even further into the dark nigh...	The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan Dylan's outstanding second album is a tremendous jump from its predecessor. Whereas the debut established him as a peerless interpreter of folk and country-blues classics, and a singer like none before, this followup features some of the most pungent original songs of the '60s. "...

Time out of Mind review
As is typical with Dylan,if there is at least one or two really good selections on the album it is worth it.....my two favorites are "It's not dark yet" and "Standing in the Doorway". J.K.

How Do You Rate a Dylan Release?
With a career now pushing towards the 50 year mark and a host of bonafide classic albums, how do you rate a CD by Bob Dylan? Do you rank it against its period or against the whole body of his work? It's difficult to just rate it as a single CD without taking in the context or his whole career or his "mystique". Comparing TIME OUT OF MIND to his early works to me is an apples to oranges equation. He was a different person in 1965 from what he was in 1997. The 97 version was coming off a period of low activity as well as a near fatal illness, where the early Dylan was basically taking on the world. The defiance that marked his early work had changed here into defiance against age and death. As such, this CD captures that feeling very successfully. He followed this with two other fine releases, LOVE AND THEFT and MODERN TIMES, but this is the superior of that trio to my ears. Teaming again with producer Daniel Lanois who oversaw his comeback album OH MERCY, Dylan brings a strong set of dark songs that he matches to some very evocative backing music. I would say that this is his strongest set since BLOOD ON THE TRACKS, which he released over 20 years before. The opener LOVE SICK sets the tone for the rest of the CD. Over a choppy, slow crawl, Dylan ruminates on love in the twilight of life. The Cd is full of great songs that follow pretty much in this vein. My favorites are TRYIN' TO GET TO HEAVEN, NOT DARK YET, STANDING IN THE DOORWAY and the rockabilly flavored DIRT ROAD BLUES. It ends with a 17-minute free associative dirge HIGHLANDS that acts as a perfect coda. Detractors might say that the album is one note, filled with depressing dirges, or might mention Dylan's admitingly blown out voice. I feel the album plays as a consistent whole, with the grim tone perfectly underlining the artist's message. Dylan's rough vocals also drive the point home. Of course, I am a fan of Tom Wait's vocals, so take that for what it's worth. To me, TIME OUT OF MIND is a classic album, one of the jewels in Dylan's vast and esteemed catalog, and my admiration of it has grown in the over 10 years that I have owned and listened to it. Just don't ask me to choose if it's a better album than HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED or BLOOD ON THE TRACKS.

mind numbingly sad
An absolutly INCEDIBLE album from the master himself. Music doesn't get sadder than this! As you go through the album from start to finish, you will just become more and more depressed. I know that sounds like a bad thing but if your like me, and you find the sadder a song the more beautiful it is, then this album is for you; simple as that. Pure desperation, and confusion of a world that has left this old man behind. I keep coming back to this masterpiece. Love Sick, Standing in the Doorway, Tryin' to Get to Heaven and Not Dark Yet are the real killers the last being my favourite off the album maybe my favourite Dylan song full stop? In short, if you're a Dylan fan and you don't own this album BUY IT... If your new to Dylan, and you're looking for a great place to start BUY IT... :)

Dead on the inside
Time Out of Mind is an agitated album, a sweaty and broken and bruised mess of a record, a terrified mongrel hiding, battered in a filthy corner. Desperation saturates and haunts it, and clogs its arteries and twists its nerves and blows smoke into its corridors, and fear burns its edges and memory tarnishes it. It's a miserable album, a soul murdered. It may seem perverse, but that's actually praise. Think about it: sometimes, misery seems to be our only companion. Sometimes we feel alone and helpless and scared, miles from anything warm or redeeming. Sometimes, hope is a joke and love is a vicious lie. Sometimes, we're staring into the abyss and as it opens up at as, as it grows wider and deeper, grabs at us. It's good to have music that reflects that, right? I mean, isn't Exile On Main Street a masterpiece because it does pretty much the same thing? Well, sort of. Time Out Of Mind does indeed get points for its pitch-perfect articulation of desperation and loss. It loses points for pretty much the same reason. It loses points because it doesn't offer an ounce of hope, because it takes the low road and simplifies all of the humanity of our darkest moments. It's an album that whispers into your ear, "yes, you're right to be sad. Things aren't going to get any better." This hopelessness is the album's central conceit, and the result is a painfully one-dimensional listening experience. The greatest works of musical depression (the aforementioned Rolling Stones album, as well as such other classics as The Queen Is Dead and Dylan's own Blood On The Tracks) were masterpieces because they found a way to channel personal anguish into a sense of liberation- The Queen Is Dead did it by being poetic, Exile On Main Street did it by being ridiculously fun, and Blood On The Tracks did it by reveling in the overwhelming redemptive power of love, successful or otherwise. Time Out Of Mind just mopes. It's emotional sludge, a dull crawling slab of misery-for-misery's own sake. It doesn't offer hope or catharsis. It just asks you to wallow, to drift. Three stars for effectively conveying that state of mind, for its bluesy textures and claustrophobic production, and for the tense, ominous "Highlands." Chalk up the less-than-perfect rating to its exhausting miserabalism and relentless melodrama.

OF COURSE
This CD won a Grammy for Album of the Year. What else is there to say! It's great.