Bob Dylan in his own words (Vol 2) on Daniel Lanois, Oh Mercy and Time out of Mind
It was thrilling to run into Daniel because he’s a competent musician and he knows how to record with modern facilities.
Daniel came to see me when we were playing in New Orleans last year and we hit it off. He had an understanding of what my music was all about. It’s very hard to find a producer that can play. A lot of them can’t even engineer. They’ve just got a big title and know how to spend a lot of money. It was thrilling to run into Daniel because he’s a competent musician and he knows how to record with modern facilities. For me, that was lacking in the past. Bono had heard a few of those songs and suggested that Daniel could really record them right.
He managed to get my stage voice, something other people working with me never were quite able to achieve. Daniel just allowed the record to take place any old time, day or night. You didn’t have to walk through secretaries, pin-ball machines and managers and hangers-on in the lobby and parking lots and elevators and arctic temperatures.
You need help to make a record, in all the decisions that go into making a record. People expect me to bring in a Bob Dylan song, sing it and then they record it. Other people don’t work that way. There’s more feedback. Someone who knows my music inside out saying, ‘You could do better than that you could surpass that.
Daniel’s real good at no excess. It’s something which gets overlooked, those songs on that last album were songs which had come to me during that last year and they were pretty much as you hear them on the record. There were some changes but not with the idea of the song picture. No-one has ever said to me, ‘Change that lyric. Make it more this way or that way.’ I mean, that might be an unfortunate thing that no one has ever done that. Sometimes you wish somebody would! You see these songs weren’t consciously anything. They were mostly just streams-of-consciousness stuff. the kind that come to you in the middle of the night, when you just want to go back to bed. The harder you try to do something, the more it evades you. These weren’t like that.
Daniel’s real good at that (no excess). It’s something which gets overlooked, those songs on that last album were songs which had come to me during that last year and they were pretty much as you hear them on the record. There were some changes but not with the idea of the song picture. No-one has ever said to me, ‘Change that lyric. Make it more this way or that way.’ I mean, that might be an unfortunate thing that no one has ever done that. Sometimes you wish somebody would! You see these songs weren’t consciously anything. They were mostly just streams-of-consciousness stuff.
Working with Daniel has always been a pleasure. It’s seems like we’ve always had some kind of understanding. We talked about these songs and how they should sound long before we recorded them. As for listeners, some people, when it comes to me, extrapolate only the lyrics from the music. But, in this case, the music itself has just a far-reaching effect, and it was meant to be that way. It’s definitely a performance record instead of a poetic literary type of thing. You can feel it rather than think about it. A lot of that might have to do with the different textures of instrumentation on it rather than the songs themselves.
My feeling and my hope is that we could work again together... because... he made it very painless. You usually work with people who don’t, with me anyway... you fall into working with people who for one reason or another happen to be there but don’t have a great understanding of what it is that you’re trying to do. They might know your name and they might know some of the songs but they don’t really have a great understanding and the heart to be able to get under it and push it up and make something out of it. They’d rather say, well show it to me and let’s record it and let me think what else I can put on it. Some songs might have had more lyrics than necessary and he might have said which verse to keep, maybe whole verses. Generally there weren’t too many problems in the lyrics. It was more... in fact there wasn’t any problems with them at all. Yeah, those songs on that last album were songs which had come to me during that last year and they were pretty much as you hear them on the record. There were some changes but not with the idea of the song picture.
Time out of Mind
This is the first album I’ve done in a while where I’ve protected the songs for a long time. I really just waited until I couldn’t wait any longer. Up until I was sick, I was putting songs on, taking songs off, I didn’t know what picture it was forming. When I got sick I had to let it all go. I spent a lot of time making it, but I haven’t really heard it in a few months. The record was recorded in January and the songs were written before then. We didn’t really do anymore after that. It was just a question then of what songs were going to be placed on it and left off. I was a little bit confused at that point. I wasn’t really sure what the final outcome was going to look like. I decided that whatever it was before I got sick, that was the way it would be.
It is a spooky record, because I feel spooky. I don’t feel in tune with anything. Yet he’s proud of having registered his ambivalence and alienation so nakedly. “I don’t think it eclipses anything from my earlier period. But I think it might be shocking in its bluntness. There isn’t any waste. There’s no line that has to be there to get to another line. There’s no pointless playing with somebody’s brain. I think it’s going to reach the people it needs to reach, and the ones it doesn’t, maybe they’ll come along another day. It says what it needs to say. We did most of the things that we tried to do, in terms of how we needed to put these songs across. They are not the types of songs you hear every day, and they needed some thought going into how they should sound. I think they sound like they were meant to be played.
Environment affects me a great deal. A lot of the songs were written after the sun went down. And I like storms, I like to stay up during a storm. I get very meditative sometimes, and this one phrase was going through my head:
‘Work while the day lasts, because the night of death cometh when no man can work.‘ John 9:4
I don’t recall where I heard it. I like preaching, I hear a lot of preaching, and I probably just heard it somewhere. Maybe it’s in Psalms, it beats me. But it wouldn’t let me go. I was, like, what does that phrase mean? But it was at the forefront of my mind, for a long period of time, and I think a lot of that is instilled into this record. I wasn’t interested in making a record that took the songs and made them into a contemporary setting.
The influences are music from the ‘20s and ‘30s, and then maybe ‘50s. A very limited influence. Just American folk music and maybe rockabilly type music from the ‘50s, but no rock n’ roll. I don’t really feel like I’ve even been influenced by rock n’ roll in terms of the Larry Williams-type rock n’ roll or the pure rock n’ roll form. Many of my records are more or less blueprints for the songs. This time, I didn’t want blueprints, I wanted the real thing.
What we tried to do with this latest record is make a CD which sounds like an old record you put on a record-player. Not necessarily an old record that’s reprocessed and made into a CD, because, let’s face it, all the stuff from the ‘20s and ‘30s and ‘40s and ‘50s has been reprocessed so it can fit onto a CD, and you don’t get the impact that it had when you first heard it when we had to play it over a record player with a needle on a piece of plastic or whatever it is, and it had impact. Records today don’t have impact, and that’s a question of the sound of technology. I mean, how many bands have you heard where chainsaw guitars and sounds coming out of a drummer that’s playing with 10 different drums and cymbals and you think it must be, like, so loud you can’t contain that sound! And then when you hear it on CD it sounds all fuzzy, and it’s not a true replica of what anybody sounds like. You go into any bar and hear a blues band and you’ll be in some kind of way moved, but then you’ll hear it on CD and wonder what you heard in the first place.
When the songs are done right they’re done right, and that’s it. They’re written in stone when they’re done right. My music, my songs, they have very little to do with technology. They either work or they don’t work. Daniel and I made that record Oh Mercy a while back, and that was pretty good at the time. But these songs, I felt, were more all-encompassing. They were more filled with the dread realities of life. My songs come out of folk music. I love that whole pantheon. To me there’s no difference between Muddy Waters and Bill Monroe.
Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book. All my beliefs come out of those old songs, literally, anything from Let Me Rest on That Peaceful Mountain to Keep on the Sunny Side. You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. I believe in a God of time and space, but if people ask me about that, my impulse is to point them back toward those songs. I believe in Hank Williams singing I Saw the Light. I’ve seen the light, too.
There’s a lot of clever people around who write songs. My songs, what makes them different is that there’s a foundation to them. That’s why they’re still around, that’s why my songs are still being performed. It’s not because they’re such great songs. They don’t fall into the commercial category. They’re not written to be performed by other people. But they’re standing on a strong foundation, and subliminally that’s what people are hearing.
I write on the road. I write thoughts and things down. Then I’ll get somewhere and look at it and see what it seems to be saying. A lot of people can’t do that on the road, but I like the movement. I have a band all the time, so we can always play it here and there. If I want to see how something is going to sound, I can hear it right. There was no pressure on me to write these songs. There was no one breathing down my neck to make this record. So like everything else, it happened when I had the time.
There was a record my mother bought when I was a kid that’s an Alan Lomax album with Peggy Seeger, Guy Carawan. This record was key when Time Out Of Mind came out when trying to figure out the sources of all the lines. Trying To Get To Heaven is almost entirely composed of lines from old folk songs and I got the ‘Riding In A Buggy With Mary’ Jane line, because Peggy Seeger sings the song on that album. But there’s a bunch of other songs on this one album that either Dylan has covered or used lines from. If I ever interview Dylan I would love to just say, “You ever see this record? - Peter Stone Brown
These songs are not allegorical, I have given that up... Philosophical dogma doesn’t interest me. This particular set of songs had more compatible musicians who played everything live. This record is not a blueprint. This is it. This is the way these songs should go, every single last one. This record went through evolutions. What you hear comes through that whole maze, that labyrinth of fire that it takes to perfect the arrangement and structure. There is no trickery to it. I mean, Dan has his wizardry that he does. But there is nothing contemporary about this record. We went back to the way a primitive record was made, before the advent of technology. It takes a certain amount of bravery to do that. And it takes musicians who understand the process. It’s almost a revolutionary concept these days. Usually everyone has his own little space. We disregarded all that, so there is no separate tracking, which is very unorthodox. We’d put two or three instruments through one amplifier. You won’t find that being done, but it all adds up to a certain effect. And the whole record is live. That adds a certain ambience to everything. We had open mikes in a very big room. You get an echo of the guitar and it fits in somewhere. You see all this electricity speaking, all this wizardry, pull out the plugs and probably very few of these people could move you, because they can’t play. They are dominated by the electricity. Guys like Elmore James played acoustically and used electricity so they could be heard in a crowded room. They weren’t depending on electricity to hide talent they didn’t have. I don’t want a bunch of flaky sounds. It’s a dead end.
We all know what the thing should sound like. We’re just getting further and further away from it, I wanted something that goes through the technology and comes out the other end before the technology knows what it’s doing. I’m not going to try to make a fake Pollyanna view. Why would I even want to? And I’m not going to deny them just because they might be a little dismal to look at. I try to let it speak for itself, but I’m not emotionally involved in it. I can deliver the message. I learned a while ago not to get personally involved, because if you’re personally involved you’re going to go over the top. I can identify with other people and situations, but I tend not to, I would rather recall things from my own life, and I don’t have to force myself... Just being in certain environments triggers a response in my brain, a certain feeling I want to articulate. For some reason, I am attracted to self-destruction. I know that personal sacrifice has a great deal to do with how we live or don’t live our lives.
I have always had it in me to do it (emotionally raw and direct songs), but I never really gave myself the opportunity. Opportunities don’t last forever, but I had to wait for the right time. I always felt I wanted to make a record the way I like to hear a record. All these songs could have been recorded with a different producer and in a different place and time, but they wouldn’t jump at you like they do. I was tired of the old [recording] methods. I hadn’t recorded for a long time, because I really couldn’t find somebody who could work with me in some other role besides patrician.
I had the songs for a while, and I was reluctant to record them, because I didn’t want to come out with a contemporary-sounding record. I didn’t feel that type of sound would be useful for these songs. So we came to an understanding that these should have an identifiable sound and that sound should not be a futuristic type of sound, but more traditional, like a record on a record player as opposed to a CD you hear on a fabulous sound system. Dan makes very stately-sounding records, so he is perfect for serving the song. He’s just interested in the song, not the personalities or any fabrications or iconic things. Is the song there? That’s all he cares about, and then he can work that magic.
Highlands was not a melodic song. It’s an old country guitar pattern that you don’t hear every day. That’s what makes it kind of hypnotic. Nobody has extracted a pattern like that and played it with a certain rhythm. It’s more country, and it’s older, and that’s why it mystifies you. It’s got that hypnotism that sounds like it would go on forever. And that’s the point. It can go on forever that particular song, if you want to call it a song, had a lot of lyrics to it. You hear maybe one third of all the lyrics to it. Nobody had gone to this area before, and I thought, let’s go there. I didn’t think anything like this had ever been captured on tape. I had to scramble around to find the right types of lyrics and basically moved lyrics around and put together the puzzle. It might sound Byzantine in its way, but it seems to make sense, doesn’t it?
I had the guitar run off an old Charley Patton record for years and always wanted to do something with that. I was sitting around, maybe in the dark Delta or maybe in some unthinkable trench somewhere, with that sound in my mind and the dichotomy of the highlands with that seemed to be a path worth pursuing. It starts off as a stream of consciousness thing and you add things to it. I take things from all parts of life and then I see if there is a connection, and if there’s a connection I connect them. The riff was just going repeatedly, hypnotically in my head, then the words eventually come along. Probably every song on the album came that way.
It’s been a long time since I recorded a song like ‘Highlands’. I wouldn’t say ‘Highlands’ was really improvised, but a lot of thoughts in it came out differently during the recording than the way they were written on paper. Actually it’s just a simple blues that can go in one direction or another.
I don’t think we had a full ensemble playing on Highlands, as I remember. There can’t be more than four people playing. I can’t say that the musicians didn’t know the song or the lyrics. I don’t know. They all understand this kind of music. Every musician there was compatible with this kind of music. I mean, I can listen to Jimmie Rodgers, and then I can listen to Robert Johnson, and I don’t hear any dichotomy. It all comes to the same place.
The blues? An extremely simple and open form in which you can say anything: but it’s become rare. I don’t even know if people know what to do with it in this world which has become a rat race. The blues stems from the land, from the cotton fields in the South. And it was taken into the big cities and charged with electricity. Today it has become electronic. You don’t feel anymore that someone is breathing there or that there is still a heart there. And the farther away it gets, the less connected it is to what I call the blues. As I said, the blues is simple and it comes from the land, just like country music - Bob Dylan
I don’t like to bring out new material because of the bootleg situation. Disillusion with the whole process of it. I started out when you could go in the studio and record your songs and leave. I don’t remember when that changed. But I found myself spending more and more time in the studio doing less and less. There wasn’t any gratification in it, really. I was writing the songs, because that’s what I do anyway. And then I had my stage band, so I figured, well, I’ll write them and I’ll play them when I play them. It’s not like we lack any songs to play on a stage.
I don’t record a record and then go on tour and play it. But eventually the songs find their way into my stage show, one by one. That means something else will have to go. When you get beyond a certain year, after you go on for a certain number of years, you realize, hey, life is kind of short anyway. And you might as well say the way you feel.
The high priority is technology now. It's not the artist or the art. It's the technology that is coming through. That's what makes Time Out of Mind... it doesn't take itself seriously, but then again, the sound is very significant to that record. If that record was made more haphazardly, it wouldn't have sounded that way. It wouldn't have had the impact that it did.... There wasn't any wasted effort on Time Out of Mind and I don't think there will be on any more of my records.
Source: Every Mind Polluting Word