Standing In The Doorway watching Dylan do his thing...

Tim Out Of Mind...

Whether this qualifies as Dylan's finest album or not is probably not important. What IS important is that, for me, this album contains all the wisdom and beauty in the world. I've probably listened to it once a week since its release back in 1997 and I'll be surprised if that pattern doesn't continue for at least another hundred and fifty years...
I don't really know what it is about this one. I won't say that it's without weakness (and when I heard the left-off cuts on Tell Tale Signs - especially 'Red River Shore' and 'Mississippi' - it was all I could do to resist making a mock-up album, just for the hell of it) but there really is something in amongst these tracks that hits every one of my many wildly swinging moods.
For me, 'Time Out Of Mind' is definitely the finest album Dylan has made since 'Blood On The Tracks', and if he hadn't already produced 'Blonde On Blonde' or 'Highway 61 Revisited' it might be the best he's ever done. Then again, maybe it's the best he's ever done anyway... I think this is one album that he really did pull out of the ether. He and Daniel Lanois achieve such a wonderfully rich and echoey sound, and then there is all the other stuff going on in the background too, not least all that haunted-by-the-ghost-of-Buddy Holly business. But in the end and through it all, it's his voice (fuelled by the best set of lyrics that he's written in an age) that does it. He sounds ancient on this, in the same way that Johnny Cash sounded ancient on the American Recordings albums, and he never fails to move me with these songs.
My favourite track on the album changes constantly, and on any given day it might be 'Tryin' To Get To Heaven' or 'Love Sick' or 'Make You Feel My Love' or 'Not Dark Yet'. Today though, it's Standing In The Doorway. I love how nostalgic the verses get and how far he lets them go before snapping them coldly back, bending them until they scream out and give with the biggest unspoken BUT that I've ever come across in either story or song. Time and again he does this, and yet the trick loses none of its sleight-of-hand magic.

Last night I danced with a stranger
But she just reminded me you were the one
(BUT) You left me standin' in the doorway cryin'
In the dark land of the sun. (bitch...)

That's the stuff of Hemingway or Raymond Chandler, in my opinion. Stripped bare but still dense with meaning. That does it for me every time...

A Small Damascus Moment

I listen to Bob Dylan when I write. He's always there, and he always seems to know exactly what to say. Today I spent five hours working on a section of my novel-in-progress, with "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands", the breathtakingly beautiful closing track on Bob's sublime 'Blonde On Blonde' album, locked in a continuous loop. Like so many of Dylan's lyrical masterpieces, this song astonishes me, more so with every listen, in fact. I adore the way I never fully feel as if I have a full understanding of his songs, even though I have lived with them virtually my entire life. It is their mystery that intrigues, I think.
There are plenty who dispute Dylan's status as a poet. I would never claim to be an authority on poetry but I have to say that no other writer's words have ever moved me quite as much as Bob's do. So maybe he is not a poet, but if not then he is something deeper than that.
It has long been my experience that when it comes to appreciating his songs slow ingestion is best. He writes them and sings them, and they are out there for us, to grow into when we are ready.
I remember when his late-90s masterpiece, 'Time Out Of Mind', was released. I listened to the album incessantly, and I remember thrilling over so many of the songs, such as "Not Dark Yet", "Standing In The Doorway" and "Trying To Get To Heaven". Lost in the mix, or somehow overlooked by me, was what had seems a lightweight number, "To Make You Feel My Love". Cover versions of the song were getting some heavy airplay, by big hitters such as Billy Joel and Garth Brooks, but for some reason I just didn't get it. That was my failing, of course, not the song's. And then, about three years ago, I was listening to the album for the umpteenth thousand time, and suddenly it was as if the noise of the whole world stopped. It's rarely anything tangible, just some inner shifting of rusty cogs, and there it is, the magic, unfurling in all its mysterious glory. More than words, more than melody, the entire thing just gets into your bloodstream. I think I didn't get the song because I wasn't yet ready to get it, my life hadn't yet reached the necessary point in its trails. It was a small Damascus moment, and one that left me wondering what other songs in Bob's vast pantheon of work have yet to properly reveal themselves to me.
A new album is always an event. Since 1997's 'Time Out Of Mind', critical acclaim for Dylan has been absolute, with 'Love and Theft' and 'Modern Times' both receiving lavish praise. Now we have another album of new material, 'Together Through Life', to ingest. The reflex action is always to love the latest work or to be disappointed that, in your mind, it falls some way short of his best stuff, 'Blood On The Tracks' or 'Bringing It All Back Home' or 'Freewheelin', or whichever album it is that turns your wheels. I try to be more cautious. For me, 'Love and Theft', initially, was a letdown, but now I understand that the weakness was mine, not the songs. So when Amazon (finally) delivers to my door, I will sit and listen, over and over and probably over again, and I'll take what Bob has chosen, for now, to give. But I won't rush anything, because I'll know that there are years worth of detail waiting to be discovered, in these songs and in all the others, but only when the time is right.
I can't help it if I'm lucky...