The air is getting hotter
There’s a rumbling in the skies
I’ve been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes
-Bob Dylan (Tryin’ To Get To Heaven)

Environment affects me a great deal,a lot of the songs were written after the sun went down. And I like storms, I like to stay up during a storm. I get very meditative sometimes, and this one phrase was going through my head: ‘Work while the day lasts, because the night of death cometh when no man can work. ‘ I don’t recall where I heard it. I like preaching, I hear a lot of preaching, and I probably just heard it somewhere. Maybe it’s in Psalms, it beats me. But it wouldn’t let me go. I was, like, what does that phrase mean? But it was at the forefront of my mind, for a long period of time, and I think a lot of that is instilled into this record.
-Bob Dylan – about “Time Out Of Mind” (to John Pareles, Sept 1997

The life here is drained, vampire-like, from a whole slew of blues songs, it’s title probably taken from the American Folk Song “The Old Ark’s A-Moverin”.. This is “Blind Willie McTell” with a hangover, a picture of the old south, “riding in a buggy with Miss Mary-Jane” and shaking the sugar down.
There is an extraordinary harmonica break, like the best of Dylan, where it carries on the sense of the lyrics into a place where language no longer works.
-Brian Hinton (Bob Dylan Complete Discography)