At Criteria, Dylan and Lanois' visions for the album began to diverge. Months later, in January, they relocated to Miami's famed Criteria Studios (The Bee Gees, Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton) with a big, rotating cast of musicians including bassist Tony Garnier and drummer Tony Mangurian, both of whom had played at the Teatro sessions. Lanois was quick to recognize the searing insight and power of the new songs Dylan was composing, and work sessions began in August 1996 at Teatro, Lanois' Oxnard, California studio. (Five additional songs were recorded during the sessions: "Mississippi," "Red River Shore," "The Water Is Wide," "Dreamin' of You," and "Marchin' to the City.") Lanois had previously produced 1989's Oh Mercy arriving after a string of lackluster-performing albums, it was regarded as a "comeback" for Dylan in much the same way Time would be. Only fourteen songs were considered by Dylan and producer Daniel Lanois for Time Out of Mind, eleven of which made the original cut. Considering the full portrait of its sessions presented here, a much more varied narrative emerges than the one popularized in 1997. Rather than merely reinforcing the legend of Time Out of Mind, Fragments adds to it - and complicates it, too. But what's most uncanny about this volume is how it redefines the parent album. In that sense, it plays more like an expanded edition than a traditional Bootleg entry. It's a bit unlike previous Bootleg volumes as it opens with the album itself, or at least a new mix of it. Now, Time Out of Mind is the subject of Fragments, the seventeenth and latest volume of Dylan's long-running Bootleg Series. If it was intended as a farewell, it failed miserably it ended up inaugurating a golden era that saw it followed by such powerful albums as Love and Theft and Modern Times. But there was more to Time Out of Mind lurking under the surface. Indeed, the album was filled with musings on lost love, mortality, hopelessness, and despair. The Oxford dictionary describes the phrase time out of mind as "a time in the past that was so long ago that people have no knowledge or memory of it." What was Bob Dylan getting at when he lifted the phrase for his 1997 Grammy Award-winning album? Critics and fans alike immediately seized on the notion of the record as some kind of dark farewell from an artist in the September of his years.
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