Time Out of Mind is the thirtieth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on September 30, 1997, through Columbia Records.

For many fans and critics, the album marked Dylan's artistic comeback after he appeared to struggle with his musical identity throughout the 1980s; he had not released any original material since Under the Red Sky in 1990.

Although Dylan has spoken positively of Lanois' production style, he expressed dissatisfaction with the sound of Time Out of Mind.

Dylan began to write a fresh string of songs during the winter of 1996 at his farm in Minnesota, which would later make up Time Out of Mind.

In a televised interview with Charlie Rose, Lanois recalled Dylan talking about spending many late nights working on the lyrics.

Dylan wanted the sound of Time Out of Mind to be influenced by early blues musicians, such as Charley Patton, Little Walter, and Little Willie John, and he recommended that Lanois listen to their recordings to prepare for the sessions.

Dylan also hired Nashville guitarist Bob Britt, Duke Robillard, Tex-Mex organist Augie Meyers, and Memphis pianist Jim Dickinson to play at the sessions.

[14] I just wanted to say, one time when I was about sixteen or seventeen years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at the Duluth National Guard Armory...I was three feet away from him...and he looked at me.

Daniel Lanois later said about the recording process of this song, "We treated the voice almost like a harmonica when you over-drive it through a small guitar amplifier".

[16] Pitchfork's Grayson Haver Callin wrote that the song shows Dylan as he "shuffles through empty streets in the rain, a tangle of warped guitar, haunted organs, and faint drums aptly framing his bleak mood".

Michael Gray writes, "'Dirt Road Blues', which might under normal production circumstances be a heartening, even dexterous little rockabilly number, puts Dylan so far away and so tiny you just despair".

In "'Til I Fell in Love with You", Dylan scholar Jochen Markhurst points to echoes of Ma Rainey's "South Bound Blues', as well as the influence of Slim Harpo.

Oliver Trager describes the track as "biting" with "ricocheting guitar licks, rockabilly drums, distorted organ, and [a] voice floating in a blimp of its own echo," in which "one can still hear, to paraphrase 'Visions of Johanna', the ghost of electricity howling from the bones of Dylan's face..."[20] Michael Gray also describes this song in detail: There's an interesting tension, too, in "Cold Irons Bound", perhaps more accurately an interesting inappropriateness between, on one side, the grinding electronic blizzard of the music and the cold, aircraft-hangar echo of the voice lamenting its sojourn across a lethal planet—fields turned brown, sky lowering with clouds of blood, winds that can tear you to shreds, mists like quicksand—and on the other side the recurrently stated pursuit of tenderness, in phrases that seem imported from another consciousness.

This song was criticized for its lyrical inferiority by The Village Voice's Robert Christgau[23] and Greg Kot of Rolling Stone.

In his review, Kot described the track as "a spare ballad undermined by greetingcard lyrics [that] breaks the album's spell".

Greg Kot wrote, "On Time Out of Mind, [Dylan] paints a self-portrait with words and sound that pivots around a single line from the album's penultimate song, 'Can't Wait': "That's how it is when things disintegrate"".

[26][27] In Jim Dickinson's account, "I remember, when we finished 'Highlands'—there are two other versions of that, the one that made the record is the rundown, literally, you can hear the beat turn over, which I think Dylan liked.

Club wrote: "The material here is generally slow and meditative, lending the work a consistent tone appropriately capped by the 16-minute 'Highlands', a 'Desolation Row'-style experiment with an extended song form; it's further proof that the singer/songwriter is far from coasting".

A second outtake, "Dreamin' of You"', also released on Tell Tale Signs, was unveiled for the first time as a free download on Dylan's website.

It was widely hailed as Dylan's comeback album and U.S. sales soon passed platinum[33] and stayed on best-selling charts for 29 weeks.

In a 2018 retrospective for Pitchfork, Grayson Haver Currin wrote that the album "would transform Dylan from seemingly obsolete icon to wise, wizened visionary almost overnight".

[10] In his review for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau said, "The hooks are Dylan's spectral vocals—just his latest ventriloquist's trick, a new take on ancient, yet so real, so ordained—and a band whose quietude evokes the sleepy postjunk funk of Clapton's 461 Ocean Boulevard without the nearness of sex".

[10] AllMusic senior editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote, "Time Out of Mind has a grittier foundation—by and large, the songs are bitter and resigned, and Dylan gives them appropriately anguished performances.

Some tracks have Dylan so buried in echo that there is no hope of hearing the detailing in his voice that was once so central and diamondlike a part of his genius".

The album manages to skip the twentieth century: trains discourage gambling, people ride in buggies, there's no air-conditioning ("It's too hot to sleep"), church bells ring, "gay" means happy, the time of day is measured by the sun, lamps apparently run on gas (and are turned "down low") and, most of the time, the singer is walking.

The best songs on Time Out of Mind are inexplicably funny; there's a wicked glee in the performance as Dylan manipulates the tatters of his voice, the scatterdness of his inspiration, the paralysis that might arise from his obsession with history, the prevailing image of himself as a mumbling curmudgeon.

"Maybe one month, or two to three days out of the year, the banks around the river get all mucky, and then the wind blows and a bunch of swirling mess is in the air.

[15] In light of Dylan's May 1997 health scare, a number of columnists, including Dylanologist A. J. Weberman, speculated that the songs on Time Out of Mind were inspired by an increased awareness of his own mortality.

[54] Hip hop group Public Enemy referenced the album's title in their 2007 Dylan tribute song "Long and Whining Road": "From basement tapes, beyond them dollars and cents / Changing of the guards spent, now where the hell the majors went?

During the performance, Michael Portnoy, an American multimedia artist and choreographer, ripped off his shirt, ran up next to Dylan, and started dancing and contorting with the words "Soy Bomb" painted in black across his chest.