‘Time Out of Mind’: The “illuminated” album Bob Dylan said perfectly captured his sound
One of the biggest hurdles for any band is getting their sound right on vinyl. It can be like pulling teeth for artists to get the sounds that they hear in their head, but Bob Dylan knew that there were always records that made him feel like his artistic vision was actually starting to come together.
But part of the beauty of Dylan’s work was that he was constantly changing his sound every time he made a record. The electric period might not have been all that much different from his original folk albums for people hearing them for the first time today, but the characters that he played in those songs are totally different. This was an artist trying on musical faces, but even when he was on top of the world, he knew he couldn’t stay there forever.
While the rest of the 1970s would keep him on a pedestal throughout albums like Blood on the Tracks and The Basement Tapes, Dylan was more interested in following his muse than any industry formula. There was the potential to make anything he wanted with his usual songwriting model, but by the 1980s, things had begun to stall a little bit.
His turn towards religious music wasn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea on principle, and outside of working with The Traveling Wilburys, things weren’t all that great when he started making his own albums in the 1990s. Something needed to change, but once he went through his own bout with health scares, Time Out of Mind felt like introducing a new version of Dylan. This one was older and wiser, but no less critical or empathetic to people’s needs.
As much as people like to single out the changes in Dylan’s delivery throughout every record he made, having his lower register take over during this part of his career is absolutely perfect for the songs. ‘Make You Feel My Love’ could easily have been a show-stopping number had it been first recorded by a belting high voice, but whereas most of his early albums felt like documents of great songs, this was the sound of him capturing the performances that he finally wanted to hear.
While it wasn’t nearly the same kind of dissection of mortality that most people thought, Dylan did admit that he felt the arrangements on the album were the closest to what he felt he should sound like, saying, “In the past, when my records were made, the producer, or whoever was in charge of my sessions, felt it was just enough to have me sing an original song. There was never enough work put into developing the orchestration, and that always made me feel very disillusioned about recording. Time Out of Mind is more illuminated. I think we are just starting to get my sound on disc, and I think there’s plenty more to do.”
That version of Dylan might be a little rougher around the edges this time around, but that’s not necessarily a detractor by any stretch. Part of the appeal of Dylan in the early days was that powerfully thin voice that was blaring over top of songs like ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, but now that he had a more brooding baritone voice, there was almost a hint of Johnny Cash-esque drama in the way that he sang his songs.
Time Out of Mind may be a far different Dylan record than the ones fans were used to hearing, but he was never one to repeat the same thing over again. He wanted to leave the audience with something that made them think, and judging by what he would be doing later on Love and Theft and Modern Times, he was definitely opening doors that he had never considered before.
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