Likewise, the Grammy Award-winning late-career 1997 comeback, “Time Out of Mind” – boasting compelling meditations on mortality including “Not Dark Yet” and “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” – is undermined by Lanois’s all-too-literal decision to make Dylan sound like he had already died and is singing from inside his tomb.
Today, listening with new ears, the producer’s heavy hand with the soundscapes and effects placed behind “Oh Mercy” numbers such as “Man in the Long Black Coast” and “Most of the Time” make the album sound more like a Daniel Lanois album than one by Bob Dylan. Both moody and evocative, boasting some of the best songs of his career, they turn out in hindsight to be flawed by the very production touches I had always enjoyed. The two records Dylan made with Daniel Lanois in the producer’s chair – 1989’s “Oh Mercy” and 1997’s “Time Out of Mind” – have always been near the top of my list. When I was first asked this question, a few albums came instantly to mind. So if “Blood on the Tracks” still stands as Dylan’s greatest album since 1975, then which subsequent collection of new songs – not counting live albums, compilations, collections of archival material, and albums featuring other people’s songs (one Christmas album, two folk song collections, and three devoted to pre-rock pop standards) – truly deserves praise as “the best Dylan album since ‘Blood on the Tracks’?” Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” (Discuss.) It doesn’t get any better than that, by Dylan or anyone, with the possible exception of the Beatles’ “Revolver” or “Sgt. The only albums in Dylan’s entire catalog that vie with “Blood on the Tracks” for critical supremacy are his two mid-60’s classics, the back-to-back albums “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965) and “Blonde on Blonde” (1966). Bob Dylan releases a new album and critics hyperventilate that it is his best since his masterful 1975 album, “Blood on the Tracks.” The latter was an acoustic song cycle largely about the dissolution of a marriage (his marriage?), and it does indeed stand the test of time as a marker for all that was to follow.