Bob Dylan Played ‘Not Dark Yet’ for First Time in Seven Years, and Totally Reimagined It

Bob Dylan is now six shows into his Lights of Autumn European fall tour, and he’s continuing to drop surprises, big and small, into every show. At Mitsubishi Electric Hall in Dusseldorf, Germany, on October 27, he broke out the Time Out of Mind classic “Not Dark Yet” for the first time in seven years. 

It sounded nothing like the previous 191 live renditions of the song over the past three decades. At just four minutes and 30 seconds, it’s two minutes shorter than the 1997 studio recording even though he sang all the verses. But he added in a slight reggae touch, removed much of the somber vibe that practically defines the song, and made dark lines like “sometimes my burden is more than I can bear” and “I know it looks like I’m movin’, but I’m standin’ still” seem somehow bright and even optimistic. 

Time Out of Mind is clearly on Dylan’s mind since he also introduced new arrangements of “Trying to Get to Heaven” and “Million Miles” at recent tour stops. The acclaimed LP launched an entirely new era of Dylan’s career, and earned him a Grammy for Album of the Year, but he’s never been satisfied with producer Daniel Lanois’ arrangements of the songs.

“[The album] got off the tracks more than a few times, and people got frustrated,” Dylan told Rolling Stone‘s Mikal Gilmore in 2001. “I got so frustrated in the studio that I didn’t really dimensionalize the songs. I could’ve if I’d had the willpower. I just didn’t at that time, and so you got to steer it where the event itself wants to go. I feel there was a sameness to the rhythms. It was more like that swampy, voodoo thing that Lanois is so good at. I just wish I’d been able to get more of a legitimate rhythm-oriented sense into it…It was tricky trying to steer that ship.”
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In the nearly 30 years since Time Out of Mind, Dylan has steered his own ship by producing all his records under the pseudonym Jack Frost. He’s also revisited the Time Out of Mind songs on the 2023 box set The Bootleg Series Vol. 17: Fragments – Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996–1997), where Dylan essentially stripped away Lanois’ “swampy, voodoo thing” that he found so objectionable.

“What we wanted to do was find a different way to look at Time Out of Mind, to contextualize it,” a source close to the Dylan camp told Rolling Stone. “We also wanted it to sound more natural and less processed.”
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The only Time Out of Mind song Dylan hasn’t played live at any point is “Dirt Road Blues.” If he wants to really stun fans on this European run, he’d break that out. The first “Highlands” since 2001 would also be a momentous occasion, though pretty difficult to imagine. 

In the meantime, we’d settle for encores of “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)” and his cover of Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927.” They both appeared on opening night in Oslo, Norway, and have been dropped ever since. There’s plenty of time for them to return since the tour runs through December 8 at London’s Royal Festival Hall, where Dylan last played in 1964.