![]() The new version, while lacking the strangeness of the released album, is riveting in its own way. Lanois looked at all that and realized the best plan was simply to submerge the whole thing in a swamp. ![]() Dylan worked again with Daniel Lanois (from Oh Mercy but here used twice the number of necessary musicians and tried to model the production on a Platonic idea of pre-technology blues. The production process was either a remarkable collaboration or a bitter fight. The first disc is a remixed, remastered version of the original album. Fragments does this work with excellence. Instead of hearing eight versions of a song with a slightly different guitar solo, we learn more about a particular artist’s process. The Dylan series has been a dramatic exception because it so frequently offers not only true insight into the artist, but varied enjoyable music. This sort of set has become standard fare in the music industry, an easy way to cash in on vault recordings geared to demographics with disposable income. Whether Dylan’s career looked to be dying or not, someone felt he’d reached the museum era before yet another revival. It’s worth noting that The Bootleg Series, of which this set is the 17th installment, began even before Time Out of Mind. Mythology sustained.ĭylan explored the history (or myth?) of this album in his book Chronicles: Volume One, but with the new boxed set Fragments – Time out of Mind Sessions (1996-1997) we get a much richer insight into the album’s history. ![]() Cue the comeback narrative, the Grammys, the string of strong releases. Then he returned from the metaphorical dead with Time Out of Mind, an album sounding like death. If MTV Unplugged showed him energized and still able to sell well, it did as much to promote MTV’s brand as to invigorate the ostensibly fading Dylan. After ending the ’80s with the acclaimed Oh Mercy, Dylan had released a throwaway album aligned with children’s music and some folk covers. If you’re Dylan, you wait until you nearly disappear and then return with a strange new sound, hints of death and a backstory involving multiple studios, crazed producers and too many musicians. Some musicians cut a few clunkers and then an album works out. Everything Bob Dylan does, by nature of being from Bob Dylan, fits into a grand mythos.
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