Time Out of Mind at 25 – The Reinvention of Bob Dylan

When ‘Time Out of Mind’ was released 25 years ago, Bob Dylan would reignite his career by returning to the music that had first fired his youthful imagination, writes Sean T Smith

Bob Dylan in 1997 (PA/Getty/The Independent)

In October 1997, Bob Dylan was 56 years old and in danger of becoming a legacy act. There hadn’t been an indisputably great Dylan album since the mid-1970s and he was widely regarded as a magnificent hurricane that had blown itself out.

But when Time out of Mind was released, Dylan would confound his critics with an astonishing return to form. The double album won three Grammies and sparked the start of a late, great resurgence in his career.

Time Out of Mind was all the more remarkable because, for some time, Dylan had seemed stranded in an endless mid-life identity crisis. After his born-again religious conversion and the subsequent trilogy of Christian rock albums in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so many of his fans had lost faith and deserted him.