One of his best albums just got even better
“Time Out of Mind” marked Bob Dylan’s artistic rebirth in the 1990s. The album is rightly celebrated to this day. However, the singer was never completely satisfied with the production of Daniel Lanois. Dylan sets things right with the Fragments box set.
IOn a warm January night in early 1996, a somewhat annoyed Bob Dylan took his leave of the studio and onto the glittering chrome streets of Miami. Producer Daniel Lanois had plagued him for hours asking for new takes of “Not Dark Yet,” a brooding song about old age and the inevitability of death.
“We tried Eb, we tried Bb,” snapped Dylan Lanois, “and you know what? If you don’t have it now, you won’t get it anymore.” So he said and disappeared.
The argument between him and Lanois had been smoldering for a long time. The finished album, which was released in September 1997 as “Time Out of Mind”, garnered critical acclaim, received three Grammys and is still loved by Dylanologists to this day. But it also pulls out all the stops of production technology, with microphones cleverly placed around the room and voices that sound like they’re coming from the ballroom next door at three in the morning. Dylan wasn’t happy. He despised the frills. He produced the next albums himself.
As can be heard on the now appearing collection of outtakes, live recordings and alternative versions of the sessions, which appear as a box set in the bootleg series under the title “Fragments”, Dylan was rightly annoyed; all versions are fantastic. The remix of the songs released on “Times Out of Mind” turns back Lanois’ sound engineering gimmicks. Dylan’s voice is now full and frontal, right at the ear. The following CDs contain alternative takes, which Dylan, who likes to distort his songs live beyond recognition, must count as the actual originals. Live versions follow, and finally, as a bonus, mostly songs Dylan wrote on his farm in Minnesota and recorded in Miami in the winter of 1995 that didn’t make it onto the album. In short: the gimmicks are gone, the atmosphere has remained.