He’d previously worked with Dylan on 1989’s well-received Oh Mercy. For the brooding and bluesy Time Out of Mind – Dylan wrote the songs while snowbound on his Minnesota farm in the winter of 1996 – Daniel Lanois was at the controls. As Steven Hyden writes in his essay in the excellent hardcover book that accompanies this 5CD box set – Volume 17 in the Bootleg Series and issued to commemorate the album’s 25 th anniversary – when Time Out of Mind emerged, reviewers tagged it as a ‘mortality album’ – pointing to songs like ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’ (“Trying to get to heaven before they close the door”) or ‘Not Dark Yet’, which is written from the point of view of a man confronting his twilight years.Ĭritics even suggested it might be the final great Bob Dylan album – it wasn’t of course, but, as it turned out, Time Out of Mind, was the last album Dylan made with a producer – all his records since have been self-produced, under the pseudonym Jack Frost. Prior to its release, Dylan had been plagued by ill health – a life-threatening respiratory infection caused by inhaling fungus spores, which he put down to riding his Harley in the Louisiana swamps. Seen as a real return to form following some patchy ‘80s offerings, it was Dylan’s first collection of original songs for seven years – since 1990’s Under the Red Sky.
The record picked up three Grammys, including Album of the Year, in 1998. When it was released in 1997, Bob Dylan’s thirtieth studio album, Time Out of Mind, was hailed as a masterpiece.
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