The album that saw Bob Dylan emulate Beck: “I want to make a record the way he makes records”
Although we’re not likely to find Bob Dylan partying until the wee small hours and performing cartwheels on stage, he is tackling his 80s with a youthful swagger. The secret to such longevity is enduring relevance as a lyrical genius coupled with a steadfast commitment to the road. As they say, “Use it or lose it.” With several enforced hiatuses, including the Covid-19 pandemic, Dylan’s so-called Never Ending Tour has kept the wheels turning since 1988.
Even in his advanced years, Dylan is a restless creative. Having released his latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, in 2020, he busies himself off the road by expanding his impressive painting portfolio and even dabbles in sculpture. Granted, Dylan isn’t likely to follow Mick Jagger’s tour bus gym workouts, but he seems to have found a way to support his creative impulses to date.
As Rough and Rowdy Ways suggests, Dylan likes to work within the confines of his long-associative folk rock genre. The album was markedly retrospective, with a nod to the late legend Jimmy Reed and an epic reflection on John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Still, when he isn’t spinning Jimmy Reed LPs and watching Coronation Street reruns, the troubadour likes to keep up to date with hip-hop and contemporary rock trends.
In a 2022 conversation with the Wall Street Journal, Dylan discussed his modern listening habits. Revealing that he’s “a fan of” hip-hop, especially that of Eminem and Wu-Tang Clan, he explained that he enjoys “anybody whose vision parallels” his. He also gave a shout-out to Royal Blood, Celeste, Rag N’ Bone Man, Jack White, Alex Turner and Nick Cave.
Dylan seemed to focus mainly on the lyrical attributes since he can relate to the “feeling for words and language” these artists possess. Dylan is also a huge fan of the contemporary stylings of Beck, the Los Angeles-based musician who, since emerging in the 1990s, has encompassed folk, hip-hop, funk, soul, and electronica.
Dylan’s admiration for Beck seemed to differ slightly in that, rather than seeing a parallel vision, he sought to follow in the youngster’s footsteps while recording Time Out of Mind in 1996. Something of a polymath, Beck oversees almost every aspect of his output, from conception to engineering and production, and has won many awards for his progressive, genre-blending approaches.
During an early session for Time Out Of Mind, Dylan said to his team, “What do you think of this kid called Beck? I want to make a record the way he makes records,” according to his engineer Mark Howard, per Mojo. Beck had recently released his fifth studio album, Odelay, an innovative masterpiece enhanced by sampling. The breakthrough record remains the artist’s most successful to date.
Seeking a similarly innovative album to return to popular acclaim following a comparative dry spell, Dylan felt he could take a few leaves from Beck’s book. Above all else, Dylan wanted to move forward while looking back, celebrating established genres in a new, exciting medium.
As producer Tony Mangurian soon realised, while Dylan was besotted with Beck’s creative vision and finished product, he wasn’t so keen on the rising star’s unconventional recording process. “He did not want to sit around for 10 minutes, waiting for loops to be put into song form,” Mangurian remembered. “He just wanted to play.”
Consequently, Dylan continued to record as he usually did, laying down his vocal and instrumental tracks in one sitting. Sometimes, the production team recorded just the chorus or the verse, but the real magic came when they constructed the final songs from selected threads, just “like the Beastie Boys or Beck.”
The result was one of Dylan’s finest records since the 1970s. Time Out Of Mind is remembered as a markedly consistent release, but ‘Not Dark Yet’, ‘Love Sick’ and ‘Cold Irons Bound’ remain essentials among the artist’s broader catalogue.