As Bob Dylan recently and aptly noted, “I Contain Multitudes.” His vast body of work, full of layers, reinventions, and digressions, can make it challenging to know where to begin. Often, the deeper cuts are as rewarding as his iconic tracks, sometimes even more so.
Take his 1997 album *Time Out of Mind*, for instance. A highly praised return to form, it was Dylan’s first collection of original material in seven years and went on to win multiple Grammys.
With a shift in sound, it marked his final collaboration with producer Daniel Lanois and featured a haunting, atmospheric tone. Its lyrics reflect on themes of aging, heartbreak, death, and the state of the world.
A recent box set has brought to light an array of unreleased material, including demos, experiments, and bonus tracks. Acclaimed Memphis pianist Jim Dickinson, who was part of the sessions, described them as a complex soundscape.
“I haven’t been able to tell what’s actually happening. I know they were listening to playbacks, I don’t know whether they were trying to mix it or not! Twelve musicians playing live—three sets of drums… it was unbelievable… two pedal steels. I’ve never even heard two pedal steels played at the same time before! … I don’t know, man, I thought that much was overdoing it, quite frankly.”
The outpouring of creativity led to the omission of some exceptional songs, including the now cult favorite, “Red River Shore.” A gorgeous ballad about love lost, it paints a vivid Western romance, lingering on what might have been.
Dylan’s opening lines are:
Some of us turn off the lights and we lay
Up in the moonlight shooting by
Some of us scare ourselves to death in the dark
To be where the angels fly
Rich in imagery and suggestion, the song never made the album. Jim Dickinson was amazed by its exclusion, considering most songwriters would view it as a career highlight.
In 2008, Dickinson reflected: “I personally felt it was the best thing we recorded. But as we walked in to hear the playback, Dylan was walking in front of me, and he said, ‘Well, we’ve done everything on that one except call the symphony orchestra.’ Which indicated to me they’d tried to cut it before.”
“I was only there for ten days, and they had tried to cut some songs earlier that didn’t work. If it had been my session, I would have got on the phone at that point and called the damn symphony orchestra.”
“But the cut of ‘Red River Shore’ was amazing. You couldn’t even identify what instruments were playing what parts. It sounded like ghost instruments. And the song itself is really remarkable. It’s like something out of the Alan Lomax songbook, a true folk song.”
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