His lyrics are depressing and his delivery sounds like he could break down at any moment. Remember those weird rumors about Dylan getting AIDS? Well, if you don’t, they certainly existed back in the day and this song, as well as “Trying to Get to Heaven,” were reasons people had for believing the rumors. Standing in the Doorway After getting listeners dancing with “Dirt Road Blues,” Dylan decides to go back to the slow, sad style of “Love Sick.” “Standing in the Doorway” is real slow, especially considering that its seven minutes of pretty much the same thing, but that isn’t really a complaint.

Its good, don’t get me wrong, but one of the least significant songs on the album. Dirt Road Blues How does Dylan follow up one of the best songs of his career? He plays a simple, almost generic blues song, that’s how! But don’t worry, folks, this is good stuff.Īnyone that has heard 2001’s excellent Love & Theft knows what to expect here … some nice, slick work by the band and Dylan delivering lyrics that, well, don’t necessarily mean much, but do blues songs ever make sense? You know the story, he says one thing, repeats it once, says something different and then the band jams. It’s all about Dylan’s voice on this one. There’s some keyboards and some guitar work, but the guitars are slow and not playing anything even remotely challenging. And the song only gets better, with Dylan’s delivery and the power of his lyrics grabbing you and never, ever letting go. This, friends, is Dylan getting back to what he does best. This isn’t just some song Dylan wrote on his tour bus while he was trying to find his muse, no, this is poetry, people, this is really damn good poetry. My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired I'm walking through streets that are dead First, you hear a haunting (there’s that word again!) guitar, and its quickly followed by Dylan, his voice more ragged than its ever sounded, delivering some of the best lyrics of his career, which is saying a hell of a lot:

“Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “All I Really Wanna Do,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Like A Rolling Stone,” “Rainy Day Woman # 12 & 35,” “Girl From the North Country” with Johnny Cash, hell, even “All the Tired Horses” and “Let’s Stick Together,” all of these album openers are highlights of their respective albums. Love Sick Dylan has always been able to open an album with a bang. Let’s go ahead and do this track-by-track, shall we?ġ. “Haunting” is an adjective I could use a lot in this review.

the album that is actually his best since Blood on the Tracks. So in 1997, there he was, nothing more than a joke to everyone but his hardcore fans, and what does he do? He releases the haunting, beautiful Daneil Lanois-produced Time Out of Mind. What made all of these sub-par releases even more irritating was that, in 1989, Dylan released Oh Mercy, which was arguably his best effort since 1975’s Blood on the Tracks. And his last studio album of original material, 1990’s Under the Red Sky, was flat-out awful, maybe one of the two or three worst of his career, and it even featured guest appearances from Slash and Elton John, so he was clearly open to anything. His last two studio albums (1992’s Good as I Been to You and 1993’s World Gone Wrong) were both entire albums of folk covers and, well, both were good, but neither was necessarily anything to write home about. Before Time Out of Mind was released in late 1997, the overall view was that Bob Dylan was finished.

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