Bob Dylan
Time Out Of Mind

"Time out of mind" arrived unexpectedly in its beauty after seven years of silence and a Dylan’s release, with "Under the red sky," that was certainly not exciting.

The new album won three Grammys (including one for the best rock album of '97) and was appreciated by both the audience and critics, who hailed it as an absolute masterpiece; in fact, the English musician Elvis Costello called "Time out of mind" Dylan’s best album ever.

Fascinating, nocturnal, and deep, "Time out of mind" is not Dylan’s best album ever but it is a great record that can stand alongside the great records that the Duluth minstrel has composed in the forty years following "Blonde on Blonde" (the others, in my opinion, are: "Blood on the tracks," "Infidels" with the outtakes, and "Oh Mercy"). Dylan’s voice in the opening track, Love sick, sounds as if it comes from another world and is set against Auge Myers' truly spectral organ. Standing in the doorway is one of Dylan’s most beautiful ballads, full of a world-weary melancholy at the limit of endurance. Tryin’ to get to heaven is a piano ballad with a personal text: once Dylan was knocking on heaven’s door, now he just tries to get there before it’s too late. Then we get to the heart of the album, Not dark yet, which is one of the most beautiful songs in the entire Dylan repertoire and, according to Emmylou Harris, the greatest song ever written about the decline of man. Cold irons bound is a snarling blues that earned Dylan a Grammy for the best male rock vocal performance, while Can’t wait is another impactful blues, slowed to almost a heartbeat. The album closes with the extraordinary epic of Highlands, a sixteen-minute track that presents Dylan as a resigned yet unrepentant ghostly commentator preparing for the end.

Great record, therefore, which sees Dylan reflecting and speaking on themes of mortality, solitude, and which seems to foreshadow and describe his encounter with death that occurred in '97, just after the recordings, due to a histoplasmosis.