Linked on Expecting Rain today is a video clip from the Charlie Rose television show, from October of 1997, where Rose talks to Daniel Lanois, Jon Pareles and Suzanne Vega about Bob Dylan and his new album, Time Out Of Mind. Click here to go to the page. I don’t remember seeing this show at the time. The segment is about twenty minutes long, and is well worth watching for the input from Dylan’s then-producer, Lanois. Note how he says that when Dylan and he first met to discuss the recording project, Bob sat down and read him the lyrics to the songs, from start to finish. That’s an interesting thing to consider, when people have these arguments sometimes over whether the lyrics should ever be contemplated outside of the context of the music. Dylan understands quite well, I think — and he did state as much in some interview the details of which escape my damaged brain at the moment — that the lyrics are the essence of his songs, which is why he can do whatever he wants with the tunes and the tempos and the arrangments in concert. The words in fact are the songs, and yet this does not take away anything from the fact that the music behind those words, as well as the manner of the performance in any given instance, determines how the song expresses itself to the listener.

The talk in the Charlie Rose show about Dylan’s mortality also reminded me of something he said in a Rolling Stone interview in 2001:

I think that’s why people say Time Out of Mind is sort of dark and foreboding: because we locked into that one dimension in the sound. People say the record deals with mortality — my mortality for some reason! [Laughs] Well, it doesn’t deal with my mortality. It maybe just deals with mortality in general. It’s one thing that we all have in common, isn’t it? But I didn’t see any one critic say: “It deals with my mortality” — you know, his own. As if he’s immune in some kind of way – like whoever’s writing about the record has got eternal life and the singer doesn’t. I found this condescending attitude toward that record revealed in the press quite frequently, but, you know, nothing you can do about that.

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