Since helming the contentious sessions for what many had prematurely considered Dylan’s actual comeback, 1989’s half-stepping Oh Mercy, Lanois had cut U2’s Achtung Baby and Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball, a wondrously atmospheric abstraction of the singer’s gorgeous and aging country vision. Possibly for the first time in his career, Dylan was beginning to blend into the scenery.īut months after Garcia’s funeral, Dylan approached the audacious producer Daniel Lanois. He had become a legacy act, accruing lifetime achievement laurels and touring his hits for Boomers in khakis. But coffeehouse covers hadn’t made Dylan a spark of resistance in the ’60s or a source of bittersweet reckonings with reality in the ’70s. He had grown disillusioned with the cycle of writing and recording, he later said, and simply wanted to play.ĭuring the ’90s, he issued two solo acoustic albums of earnest, sometimes poignant renditions of American standards, delighting those who had pined for the lost days of the folk kid from Greenwich Village. Seven years had passed since he had released an original new tune, and that album, Under the Red Sky, was a near-catastrophe, scuttling what had seemed a comeback after Dylan crept through his polarizing ’80s evangelism. What Dylan had left to say or whether he had any enthusiasm left for saying it had, for a while, been unclear.
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