![]() “I squandered the years of my youth,” he finally confesses. Now Dylan sounds like an Al Green loverman in a dimly lit club as dawn breaks, and feels like “a ghost in love”. “Highlands”, enlivened by spectral touches of wild mercury guitar, reveals its unsuspected, close connection to more phantasmagoric mid-’60s epics, as he follows “the snap of the bow” into the titular, mythic hills.ĭiscs 2 and 3 detail the sessions that led to this, opening with the Oxnard “Dreamin’ Of You”, wildly different to both its Tell-Tale Signs take and evolution as “Standing In The Doorway”. “Make You Feel My Love” is a glorious gospel ballad carried by hushed organ, “Can’t Wait” is sexy, funky and funny with a steam-hammer beat. The drums then stormily whip up “Cold Irons Bound”, Dylan seeing “nothing but clouds of blood” in this version. “Dirt Road Blues”’ skipping roadhouse groove is bettered by “Million Miles”’ slinky urban simmer, its cymbals’ jazzy, crystalline glint and rock’n’roll guitar’s rough, metallic grain sounding like a Shadow Kingdom refit. Here, though, lost verses return, and that voice is the absolute focus – driven on by massive drums on “Love Sick”, left still more bereft on “Standing In The Doorway” and upfront in its gorgeous articulation of disaffection on “Not Dark Yet”. The album’s vinyl incarnation also anyway steered much closer to the jumping ’50s sound Dylan wanted. It’s a moot point just how stripped back this remix really is, as Dylan’s voice retains a Sun Studio echo, and the same worked-over takes are used. That collection’s motherlode of great unreleased songs seems exhausted, the Bootleg Series now instead focusing on showing facets of Dylan’s many jewels in a new light. Seemingly lesser songs now dance from the speakers, reborn.įragments also traces the work’s January 1997 shift in Miami towards its final form, adds Never-Ending Tour reimaginings of the songs and, in a fifth disc, relevant tracks already released on Tell-Tale Signs. ![]() It also disinters initial, autumn 1996 sessions at Lanois’s funky Teatro home studio in Oxnard, California, discovering mind-blowing sketches for a radically different, R&B-flavoured album, its death-haunted lyrics less important than Dylan’s lusty exuberance at his creative rebirth. Twenty-five years on, “Standing In The Doorway”, “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven”, “Not Dark Yet” and “Highlands” are still peaks, and Lanois’s work still sometimes tips from essential to overwhelming, just as he and Dylan fiercely wrestled for control during the record’s fraught Miami sessions.įragments, the new five-disc Bootleg Series excavation of those sessions, reimagines Time Out Of Mind in a Michael Brauer remix which strips away Lanois’s arguable excesses, leaving it closer, it’s claimed, to how the music sounded in the room. Then there was Daniel Lanois’s production: an inescapable, miasmic atmosphere thicker yet than his work on Oh Mercy, technologically mutating the echoing ’50s sound Dylan had requested. I heard Time Out Of Mind’s miracle on a preview cassette in a friend’s parked car, our jaws dropping to at least four plainly great songs from a hero who’d seemed spent.
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