The album Bob Dylan was forced to make: “I didn’t want to record anymore”
No one in their right mind was ever going to tell Bob Dylan what to do whenever he made his records.
Even though he had flirted with being a hit maker back in the 1960s, Dylan was far more content to make the music that he wanted and hope that it found an audience on the strength of the songs whenever he performed. He didn’t care about pleasing the masses every single time he went into the studio, but even if he was making music purely for himself, he didn’t feel like he really needed to release some of the tunes that he made whenever he walked into the studio.
After all, some of Dylan’s works were never supposed to be heard at all. Even when working on some of his masterpieces like ‘Tangled Up In Blue’, his tunes would forever be a work in progress, and when listening to him performing some of them, it wasn’t out of the question for him to throw in some new lyrics to the tune that wouldn’t have fit the kind of mindset that he was in years before.
Because, really, Dylan’s music is always changing from the minute that he walks out onstage. His Neverending Tour was supposed to be a living document of where he was at the time, and even if people show up expecting to hear songs like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ or ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, they might be a little bit disappointed when they see someone with a gruffer voice that’s trying their best to sing the songs that they are feeling at the time.
If we’re being honest, his persona whenever he performs is a lot like David Bowie in the sense that he’s constantly evolving, but something strange happened after the 1980s. His days of being an evangelist songwriter had come and gone, but there was still a lot more for him to work on than a bunch of folk tunes. Under the Red Sky was already a little bit underwhelming, but Time Out of Mind is a much more revealing record than Dylan probably intended when he first began working on it.
He had been going through some health issues, and since a lot of the characters in these songs talk about the raw emotions they’re feeling, you can’t help but think that Dylan was wondering about his own psyche. But if you were to ask him, he felt that some pieces of the album should never have been released at all when he first started writing them.
There were plenty of tunes that anyone would have been proud to call their own, but Dylan wasn’t exactly ready to put something like this out to the public at the time, saying, “They gave me another contract, which I didn’t really want. I didn’t want to record anymore, I didn’t see any point to it, but lo and behold they made me an offer and it was hard to refuse. I’d worked with [Daniel] Lanois before, and I thought he might be able to bring that magic to this record. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll give it a try.’ There must have been twelve, fifteen musicians in that room – four drummers notwithstanding. I really don’t know how we got anything out of that.”
But even if Dylan could have called this album an example of him phoning it in, it’s a testament to the kind of artist that he always was whenever he made a new record. No one could have imagined making a tune like ‘To Make You Feel My Love’ this late into their career, but since Dylan already had diamonds on The Basement Tapes that he never fully finished, the fact that he could make an epic like ‘Highlands’ was proof that he was still looking for that one magical verse this late into his career.
Most people at this point in their career would have been touring the nostalgia circuit and counting their money, but Dylan was never that kind of artist. He was born to be a musical drifter every time he performed, and it was worth it for him to make songs that reflected where he was at the time rather than worrying about playing to arenas of people that wanted to hear ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.
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