“Different people”: The Bob Dylan album that made him change his audience
Most artists can only dream of having an audience that sticks with them. No one is entitled to have the masses hear their music, but if they manage to put three chords together in the right way or write that one line that defines everything for the listener, people will be willing to linger on their every word to see what they have to say. But Bob Dylan never claimed to want any specific audience, and on this album, he deliberately tried to change the clientele listening to his music.
If you look at his history, though, almost every one of Dylan’s albums was meant to be a challenge to his audience. The Basement Tapes were bound to be a lot for anyone to take in, and even if there were some fantastic songs in his back catalogue, many fans would have had to be wondering what the hell he was thinking when putting together the track listing for Self Portrait.
That’s because Dylan never liked being in one spot for too long. The worst thing that someone could have done was put him in a singular box as an artist, so most of his daring career moves came from him moving in different directions, whether that was switching to electric guitars on Bringing It All Back Home or having the power to relinquish control when working with The Traveling Wilburys.
By the time Dylan entered the 1990s, though, most of his contemporaries had become glorified nostalgia acts. Artists like The Rolling Stones were still going strong on the touring circuit, but looking at what they were playing every night, most people were coming to hear the band that played ‘Satisfaction’ rather than whatever weird experiment they had made on Voodoo Lounge or Bridges to Babylon.
That’s not what Dylan was about, though. He wanted to test his audience at every turn, and on Time Out of Mind, he made one of his most engaging records since Blood on the Tracks. While no one was expecting his voice to get better with age, hearing him inhabit his material as he did during his glory years was a breath of fresh air from everyone questioning whether he had lost it when making a song like ‘Wiggle Wiggle’.
But Dylan made it a point to change his audience when he went to tour the record, saying, “Time Out of Mind, that was the beginning of me making records for an audience that I was playing to night after night. They were different people from different walks of life, different environments and ages. There was no reason for these new people to hear songs I’d written 30 years earlier for different purposes. If I was going to continue on, what I needed were new songs, and I had to write them, not necessarily to make records, but to play for the public.”
And considering how much work he had done over the years, Dylan’s songwriting had aged like a fine wine. Although nothing was going to replace records like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ or ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, ‘Make You Feel My Love’ is still one of Dylan’s modern classics that put him in the same class as artists like Johnny Cash as a living legend of his time.
Even if Time Out of Mind isn’t Dylan’s most immediately engaging record by any stretch, it was incredibly necessary for the rest of his career. After all, one usually has to make ‘Make You Feel My Love’ first before having the artistic drive to one day create a track like ‘Murder Most Foul.’
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