The album that restarted Bob Dylan’s career: “That was the beginning”
It tends to be difficult to get a read on what Bob Dylan wants the public to know.
He might be one of the most brutally honest songwriters of his generation, but even if he saves some of his greatest lines for song lyrics, his interviews show him speaking out of both sides of his mouth and toying with what everyone’s perception of him was supposed to be. He put a lot of guards up whenever he made many of his records, but he did make a point to disown pieces of his catalogue that weren’t all that relevant anymore.
But, really, there’s no way to really call any of Dylan’s records insignificant. Oh, there are some that are god-awful or downright confusing, but even if there are records that don’t hold up to the passage of time, they deserve to exist as pieces of his greater catalogue. He was a storyteller, and even if Self Portrait caught a lot of flak back in the day, it was always going to do a better job at telling the story of what Dylan’s life was like at that exact moment in time whenever he performed.
If you look through every facet of his career, though, he was never one to get nostalgic about his music all that much. No Direction Home does a great job at contextualising what his music was about during that time, but even with that documentary being about his life, I’m Not There is a much more accurate description of what Dylan’s life is like. He doesn’t appear once in the film, and the whole thing is fictionalised, but it says a lot more about Dylan’s persona being that of a man with many different faces.
‘I Contain Multitudes’ is probably the most accurate song title that he ever came up with, but after having some fun with The Traveling Wilburys, things started to turn a corner for Dylan. He was still trying to make the greatest folk music that he could, but after going through a massive setback with heart disease, Time Out of Mind offered everyone a much more world-weary Dylan than what had come before.
While he didn’t set out to make a record that was explicitly about mortality, you can hear him getting a lot more honest about the way that he approached his craft. ‘Make You Feel My Love’ and ‘Tryin’ To Get to Heaven’ are some of the finest tunes that any artist could hope to write this late into their career, but after getting that kind of career resurgence, Dylan felt that a lot of what he had done in the past didn’t seem to have the same lustre as it used to.
It’s almost insane to think that about songs like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, but Dylan seemed to look at Time Out of Mind as his musical rebirth, saying, “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.”
That’s probably why Dylan rarely played some of his classics when he went back on the Neverending Tour following this record. There are a few times where he will turn in songs like ‘Desolation Row’ again, but if he was going to sing a song in the modern age, he wanted it to be something that he could say with his full chest, which is probably why Love and Theft managed to be even more blunt in its delivery.
Some of the hardcore fans might have been a bit disappointed, but Dylan was making music to please the fans all the time. He needed to be satisfied with what he made, and a lot of his later records show an artist that was constantly willing to evolve with every other song that he came up with.
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