The album that left Bob Dylan disappointed: “It wasn’t the album I wanted to make”
Some of the best albums of all time tend to sound much better in the artist’s head than on the final product. No matter if they have the best producers that money can be and have the most mind-expanding set of lyrics in their arsenal, there are always going to be moments that simply don’t come together or have a few kinks in the armour once the songs are brought to be mastered. Although Bob Dylan has been defined by his inability to stay in one sound for too long, that doesn’t mean that he has to like every single thing he made.
Granted, a lot of Dylan’s wild creative detours were always by design. He was always focused on the character that he was building throughout every one of his songs, and that meant finding pieces that suited whatever he felt at the time. He could be a bit of a smartass during Bringing It All Back Home, spiritually healed on Slow Train Coming, or heartbroken on Blood on the Tracks, but there was no telling which one of his faces was going to show up on the next record.
But in the wake of the new millennium, Dylan could have done whatever he wanted. The days of vinyl restrictions had long since passed, and thanks to his continual Neverending Tour being in full swing, he was always living up to his persona as a lonesome drifter who spouted out bits of wisdom wherever he went. When he took his foot off the gas on tour, though, that made every single album feel like an event.
Something like Time Out of Mind grappled with Dylan’s approach to his twilight years, and despite being one of the few dinosaurs of rock’s golden age still making music, most of his contemporaries would have been lucky to have a “Love and Theft” under their belt. For someone of Dylan’s calibre, though, Tempest helped remind everyone of the folkie that had grown up through all those years.
A lot of the tunes had that same snide attitude, but there were also moments where he could be more contemplative than he was before. Dylan was never one to point fingers for the hell of it, and listening to the John Lennon tribute ‘Roll On John,’ he was willing to take inventory of his life and use each track to mark the miles that brought him to the other side of his career.
“It’s not the album I wanted to make, though. I had another one in mind.”
bob dylan
That didn’t mean that every one of his songs had to be a classic, though, eventually telling Rolling Stone, “The songs just fall together. It’s not the album I wanted to make, though. I had another one in mind. I wanted to make something more religious. That takes a lot more concentration – to pull that off 10 times with the same thread – than it does with a record like I ended up with, where anything goes, and you just gotta believe it will make sense.”
Since Dylan already had his born-again phase in the 1980s, though, Tempest works much better due to its universal outlook on spirituality. There are a few tracks that deal with what’s awaiting all of us on the other side, but a track like ‘Duquesne Whistle’ sounds like Dylan finally leaning into the Woody Guthrie comparisons and making ditties that feel like they’ve existed since the dawn of time but only happened to be recorded recently.
While Dylan has kept trucking along and even managed to find time to redo some of his old classics over the years, it’s probably for the best that it didn’t work out the way he originally planned. No one could tell where he was going during his prime, so getting the most authentic version of his music comes from Dylan not even knowing where he was headed.
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