07/01/2009 by Tony Attwood.

“Time out of mind” starts just about as low as you can imagine – “Love Sick” tells us the singer has had enough – enough not just of love, but of life.  It is the ultimate farewell song.

Except it is not, for although it is hard to imagine the album could get any lower in emotional terms Dylan does just that.  And we are asking just how sick of life has Dylan got?

“Dirt Road Blues” seems to offer some chance of respite, but then we have “Standing in the Doorway”, and amazingly we are even deeper in the emotional mire than “Love Sick”.

It is an extraordinary achievement, not just because of the lyrics, not just because of the melody, nor even the chord sequence (which unusually modulates from E major to A major) but also for the production.  Dylan’s songs, as we all know, are often rushed through, recorded with errors from the accompanying musicians allowed to stand.  (Think of the bass player on Johanna if you want one example).

But not here – this is perfection; the perfection of darkness.

Yet in contrast Dylan’s voice is soft and gentle, as if he is resigned to his fate – and indeed that is where he ultimately takes us with Not Dark Yet.

But that is three tracks away.   We start off here with very Dylan-esque commentary (“Yesterday everything was going too fast, Today, it’s moving too slow”) but then almost immediately we are shocked…

“Don’t know if I saw you, if I would kiss you or kill you
It probably wouldn’t matter to you anyhow.”

What?

Not only are the lyrics shocking, but the melody just strolls along, with the descending bass (and thank goodness for a bass player who has learned his part) and the slide guitar.  Even the drummer knows how to be laid back.

There’s no doubt that the subject matter has not changed from “Love Sick” – his lover has left…

“The ghost of our old love has not gone away
Don’t look like it will anytime soon”

And we remember that this is the man who just a few years back gave us that most amazing lovers’ line ever, “I’m going to look at you til my eyes go blind”.

We also wonder, did he kill her?

“Maybe they’ll get me and maybe they won’t” suggests that this is more of a horror than we ever imagined.  Or is going to kill himself…

“I know the mercy of God must be near, I’ve been riding the midnight train”

And…

 
“I can hear the church bells ringing in the yard I wonder who they’re ringing for”

He is trying to live on (“Last night I danced with a stranger, But she just reminded me you were the one”) but he is going nowhere.  Anyway, he’s sick of love, as we already know.

So life stops, he stops, and he prepares us for the journey towards death that Not Dark Yet foretells.   He has nothing to do, and nowhere to go – reliant on others now, not himself.  This is the end, “I see nothing to be gained by any explanation”.

And that’s it.

“You left me standing in the doorway crying
Blues wrapped around my head”

But it would be a mistake to think this is just about the lyrics.   “Standing in the doorway” is an extraordinary piece of music, brilliantly played.  What Dylan song has given us such lyricism, such gentleness, and all played against such a dreadful storyline?   Nowhere has lost love been portrayed so exquisitely.  

On its own this song is an utter masterpiece.   In the context of Time Out of Mind it is a work of genius.   For this is the song, along with Not Dark Yet, that gives us the meaning of the album’s title.

If Dylan had written nothing else, he would be worthy of a place in the hall of fame.

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21/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

For me, to understand of Highlands, there needs to be a view of “Time out of mind”.  While many Dylan songs can stand apart from the albums on which they make the first appearance, most of Time out of Mind is fixed within the original album.

And indeed not just fixed within the album – but within a position within the album.   “Love Sick”, the opening track, sounds as if it is the end of everything – as if the singer can go no lower than where he is now.  And yet Dylan takes us down and down until the ultimate depths of “Not Dark Yet” – the song about dying.

After which there is no way but on and on, until we enter a misty no-mans-land, a vision of what is after death.  This is not heaven or hell, nor the currently popular vision of all-encompassing darkness out of which comes something appallingly awful.  This is white mist, memories, flashbacks, strange characters, and confusion of what actually happened in the past, and what you might think happened, but which might well simply be an invention.

It’s a 12 bar blues – much extended but still a 12 bar blues with meandering guitars which help us meander to the various places.

From the very start we are transported from place to place, verse by verse.  The opening verse is not one of those classics that begins “I dreamed that…” and carries on with dreaming I was back in the good times, that you were still alive, or whatever.

In the first verse the emotions of the singer are in the beautiful land and in the second he’s back in the daily grind.  So which one is true – as the third verse shows, he has no idea, and he’s really not trying to sort it out.

Verse four is back to the vision, the emotional home, and the singer knows he can make it there, but only slowly, gradually, and the methodology of transport is not yet clear.  What a transformation this is from track seven on the album where the only way forward is to enter the darkness.   He has moved on, to a world that is beyond the death of Not Dark Yet.

Verse five, and he uses the methodology that everyone who is seriously into music will use – music as a method of transportation to another world.  In this case he tries Neil Young – it doesn’t take him to the Highlands but it takes him a little along the road – although not to anywhere he recognises.

By verse six it is all getting too much, everything is breaking up, nothing is connecting, nothing is wanted, no possessions, just a search for a mental liberty, until in verse seven there is that flash of revelation just at the moment of waking – that moment where there is a beautiful insight, but as consciousness comes pouring in, it is lost, and in verse eight he’s moved on again, this time to Boston – just another image, another past moment – real or imagined.

By now the images are becoming almost dream-like – as in those dreams where nothing is quite as it should be, and you have know it is a dream, but you don’t know it enough to get out.   The conversation in the restaurant becomes surreal, all touch is being lost with the Highlands, we are getting bogged down in dream-like detail.

The next transformation back is a sudden jump – one second in the street, next back in the Highlands, but with each of these jumps there is a further disconnection from the current world and an ever stronger link with the new imagined Highland world – and he is lost.  He can’t join in the fun and games of those around him any more, because there have been too many jumps.

He recognizes the problem in the penultimate verse:

“I got new eyes, Everything looks far away”

While the end gives us the solution

There’s a way to get there, and I’ll figure it out somehow
But I’m already there in my mind, And that’s good enough for now

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06/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

You want a masterpiece from the old boy – here it is. Unexpected, it seems to have come out of nowhere after seven years. The opening seconds present a growl of uncertainty, before the guitar clicks in, and we have no idea what is going on. And yet within seconds of the start of that opening verse, we know exactly where we are…

I’m walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping

… we are at the end. The very end. After this there is nothing. The understated vocal, the perfect backing, the accurate singing, this is the farewell performance.

“I’m sick of love but I’m in the thick of it”

It is perhaps the strangest way ever to start an album – starting with what appears to be the end. And this 1997 desolation row is far more personal than Desolation Row itself. There is no one else to blame, no Eliot and Pound fighting in the captain’s tower, because everyone else is leading an ordinary life, everyone else has a life, while the singer is just hanging on to a shadow.

So the chords of E minor and D rock back and forth, and the verse ends with a descent of E minor, D major, B minor, A major – and the descent is a descent in every respect.

It feels like the end, with the utter perfection of the accompaniment having its own understated say in the instrumental verse.

It continues, and when you think it can’t get any more painful it hits those final heart wrenching closing lines that everyone has felt. You only have to listen to Dylan’s voice on those last few notes to know the sorrow and pain.

Just don’t know what to do
I’d give anything to
Be with you

You only have to listen to the accompaniment that unexpectedly breaks up over the final B minor A major chord, before falling into the E minor to know this is the end of the end.

And yet amazingly this is not as low as it goes, because this album keeps taking us down, down and down, track after track until finally we hit Not Dark Yet, and the return journey begins into the fantasy world which ends up in Highlands. For once the track order makes some kind of sense.

This is the Vision of Johanna of the old man watching the shadows. At least in the original Visions there is the feeling that there are friends out there, and the young man singing will ultimately “get over it”. Here, there is no chance. It is downhill all the way.

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10/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Not Dark Yet is one of the triumphs of Dylan’s later work – a pivotal point on the album, the darkest moment (despite the title) which then leads the way towards light.

I’ll consider the album as a whole on another occasion, but the song itself manages to create a dreamlike quality of drifting in and out of sleep, while considering the past, and waiting for the end.

It is in many ways a return to the Taoist concept of “Darkness within Darkness, the way to all understanding” – not least achieved by the way the song stretches itself out, with the unexpected additional beat between bars, and the lack of any instrumental lead during the non-vocal verse.

From the “Shadows are falling” line, we find the simple link between the end of the individual’s life, and the end of the day, to be as one. Time and life united in its situation – it is autumn, the elderly man stares at the sunset, ready to take his leave but knowing that the time has not yet quite come. Wondering why he has to continue with memories, achieving nothing new, just being.

There are no regrets here, no sadness, not really a desire for it all to end – just an acceptance that this is how it is.

I’ve always had the feeling since I first heard the song that it is hard to understand it unless you have known an elderly relative or friend who is living alone, or in a home, finishing their days with less fun and enthusiasm than you would have liked them to have. The song captures every element of that reality of the experience and the song itself become entangled totally in life. All that is left are memories: “I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal.”

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