

I started just assembling people that I knew could play. So we started to use some musicians that Lanois would choose and a couple that I had in mind. “I was kind of just auditioning players here and there for a band, but I didn’t feel like I could trust them man-to-man in the studio with unrecorded songs. “I didn’t have the same band I have now,” Dylan said in 2001. Lanois reluctantly agreed, but they had trouble picking the right musicians for the project. This is where stripped-down renditions of songs like “Not Dark Yet” and “Trying to Get to Heaven” were first put on tape.Īfter just a few weeks, however, Dylan decided he wanted to move the sessions to Criteria Studios in Miami, Florida.

#Time out of mind movie#
They began work at an abandoned Mexican movie theater in Oxnard, California called Teatro. He found that Dylan hoped to somehow recreate the haunting, minimalistic vibe of those artists’ decades-old blues and country recordings. Lanois agreed to help Dylan turn the songs into an album, and was given vintage LPs by Charley Patton, Little Walter, and Arthur Alexander as reference points. The myth that rock ‘n’ roll belonged only to the young was about to be shattered by the steel-blue eyes of the man himself.” Decades of life experience and testimony lay on the pages in front of me. Bob had written from a perspective that few had seen. “I was stunned by the power of the lyrics.

“I hadn’t heard a note or any melody, but an overwhelming sensation came over me,” Lanois wrote in his memoir Soul Mining: A Musical Life. They’d worked together on the acclaimed Oh Mercy in 1989, and Dylan had just written a new batch of lyrics after years of writer’s block. I’d never heard a record quite like it before, and it’s one of those records I’ve played over and over and over.”įor Daniel Lanois, the Time Out of Mind journey began in 1996, when he met up with Dylan in a New York hotel room to discuss the possibility of a new record. It’s a selection of songs that are talking about a broken man, basically. I don’t want it to be a completely different thing.’ That’s because Time Out of Mind is one of my favorite Dylan records. “I told them, ‘I’ll do this, but I’m not reinventing it. “I was told to make it sound like more of a singer-songwriter record,” Brauer tells Rolling Stone.
#Time out of mind series#
To accomplish that, they brought in veteran record engineer Michael Brauer, whose work on the Dylan catalog goes back two decades and includes several of the the recent Bootleg Series box sets and the SACD releases of Dylan’s core catalog. “We also wanted it to sound more natural and less processed.” “What we wanted to do was find a different way to look at Time Out of Mind, to contextualize it,” says a source close to the Dylan camp. The five-disc collection is also packed with early versions, alternate takes, studio outtakes, and live versions of all 11 original tracks. It’s the centerpiece of Fragments - Time Out of Mind Sessions 1996-1997, the 17th volume of his ongoing Bootleg Series, in stores Jan. A quarter-century later, Dylan is releasing a remixed version of Time Out of Mind that minimizes the “swampy” vibe he found so objectionable in favor of a more natural sound.
