Tag Archives: Oh Mercy

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs, The Best Songs

March 23, 1989 Bob Dylan Recorded “Series of Dreams”

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bob dylan series_of_dreams

Dreams can tell us a lot about ourselves, if we can remember them. We can see what’s coming around the corner sometimes without actually going to the corner..
~Bob Dylan (to Bill Flanagan in 2009)

“Series of Dreams” is a major Dylan song and an important statement.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist Volume 3: Mind Out Of Time 1986 And Beyond)

@ #62 on my list of Dylan’s 200 best songs. First recorded on March 23, 1989 during the recording sessions for Oh Mercy. It was overdubbed and first released in 1991 as the final song on “The Bootleg Series 1-3”. It is a great haunting song.. with fascinating lyrics.

1991 version:

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Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs, The Best Songs

Bob Dylan’s best songs: Dignity

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bob dylan dignity

Of the virtues, I suppose I think integrity is the most essential. Not dignity – a thief can have dignity.
~Bob Dylan (to Barbara Kerr, Feb 1978)
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‘Dignity’, which describes so resourcefully the yearning for a more dignified world, would have been the album’s [Oh Mercy] ideal opening track. It scorches along musically, declaring its allegiance to the timeless appeal of the blues, while sounding, above all things, fresh. Its lyric, meanwhile, though ‘Dylanesque’ in that it sounds like no-one else’s work and sounds like a restrained, mature revisit to a mode of writing you might otherwise call mid-1960s Dylan, is fully alert and freshly itself, admits of no leaning on laurels, and has the great virtue that while not every line can claim the workaday clarity of instructional prose, the song is accessible to anyone who cares to listen, and offers a clear theme, beautifully explored, with which anyone can readily identify.
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)

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@ #43 on my list of Dylan’s 200 best songs. It was originally recorded for “Oh Mercy” in 1989, but Dylan wasn’t satisfied with it… and left it. Michael Gray points out that it would have been a perfect opening track to the album… way better than “Political World”… only thing missing was an instrumental solo in the middle.

I will not mess with too many details around the songs recording history.. even Clinton Heylin calls Dignity’s recording history a bit… messy….

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Officially we now have 5 different versions available:

# released Album
1 1994 Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume 3
Brendan O’Brien remixed version
2 1995 MTV Unplugged
Live version
3 2000 The Best of Bob Dylan, Vol. 2
Touched By An Angel version*
4 2008 The Bootleg Series Vol. 8
Piano demo version
 5 2008 The Bootleg Series Vol. 8
Tell Tale Signs version2

* First released on the album “Touched By An Angel: The Album” – TV Series soundtrack compilation (1998)

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Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs

Bob Dylan’s best songs – Most Of The Time

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Bob_Dylan-Oh_Mercy-Frontal

Most of the time
I’m clear focused all around
Most of the time
I can keep both feet on the ground
I can follow the path, I can read the signs
Stay right with it when the road unwinds
I can handle whatever I stumble upon
I don’t even notice she’s gone
Most of the time
~Bob Dylan (“Most Of The Time”)

“I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me.”
~Bob Dylan (David Gates interview Sept 1997)

“Most of The Time” is a “big song,” a major work, the sort of listening experience that brings people back to an album again and again.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist Volume 3: Mind Out Of Time 1986 And Beyond)

“Most Of The Time” is the most atmospheric track on the best Bob Dylan album of the 1980s.
~Nigel Williamson (The Rough Guide To BD)

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“Most Of The Time” is my fav song from “Oh Mercy”, and it’s the “Oh Mercy” version that’s @ 31 on my top 200 list. This is however not my fav studio version.. as you will see further down in this post.

I really love the lyrics & Bob’s vocal on this one…

Here is Andrew Mueller (The Guardian) from the documentary “Both Ends of The Rainbow”:

Most of the time
It’s well understood
Most of the time
I wouldn’t change it if I could
I can make it all match up, I can hold my own
I can deal with the situation right down to the bone
I can survive, I can endure
And I don’t even think about her
Most of the time
~Bob Dylan (“Most Of The Time”)

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Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan recording sessions

March 7: Bob Dylan’s second recording session for Oh Mercy in 1989

bob dylan Oh-Mercy

 

“Bono had heard a few of those songs and suggested that Daniel [Lanois] could really record them right, Daniel came to see me when we were playing in New, Orleans last year and… we hit it off. He had an understanding of what my music was all about.”
~Bob Dylan (to Edna Gundersen Sept 1989)

On the first recording session for “Oh Mercy” he only tried “Born In Time”, and two versions from this session was released on “Tell Tale Signs”. The second sessions focused on “What Good Am I?” & Ring Them Bells.

The Studio
New Orleans, Louisiana
7 March 1989
Second Oh Mercy recording session, produced by Daniel Lanois

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Bob Dylan, Cover versions

5 great cover versions of Ring Them Bells

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ring1

photo: Taken from a bootleg of Oh Mercy outtakes

The lyrics of the Dylan’s song Ring Them Bells are dark, to me, they are much darker than  the melody reveals. The Melody sounds sombre but uplifting in its own dignified way. I can understand why so many artists have made their own interpretations of the song. I have picked a few that I like especially good.

Let us start with Sarah Jarosz’s acoustic performance of Ring Them Bells for Vanguard and Sugar Hill Record’s The Americana Sessions recorded and taped at Minutia Studios in Nashville, TN. It is taken from  Jarosz’s 2011 album,  Follow Me Downavailable on Sugar Hill Records.

Sarah Jarosz – Ring Them Bells:

 

My second choice is quite different but equally good.

Sufjan Stevens – Ring Them Bells (audio):

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