Inside The Making of Bob Dylan’s Luminous Late-’90s Masterpiece
Jan. 29, 2023 Twenty-five years later, and with a new box set helping to tell the tale, producer Daniel Lanois and engineer Mark Howard remember the birth of Dylan’s “Time Out of Mind.” “Creative ability is about pulling old elements together and making something new,” Bob Dylan told me last month. “You have to have a vivid imagination.” By the end of the 1990s, however, he was largely seen by the general public as a spent creative force; one whose vivid imagination had been dimmed by time and disillusionment. Dylan’s concerts, always real-time explorations of his restless creativity, were increasingly demanding for the more casual fan and had become the bastion of his diehards. And his albums, once greeted as manna from on high, were now—after what was perceived as a patchy 1980s and early ’90s, save for his tenure in the Traveling Wilburys—mostly being ignored. But Time Out of Mind, released in the fall of 1997 and out now in a reimagined and expanded edition as part of Dylan’s ...