With the increased visibility to his profile that the Wilburys project provided, Dylan knew his next solo record would need to be extra-good. Forsaking his habit of filling up an album with covers and rejected tunes from the record before it, Bob sat and wrote ten whole new songs by himself for Oh Mercy. On the advice of Bono, Dylan hired French-Canadian producer, Daniel Lanois, to give this new record a distinctive sound that was appropriate to the tunes rather than chasing the current trends.

The gambit paid off, with Oh Mercy receiving some of Dylan’s best reviews and pulling him out of his commercial slump. Unfortunately, Lanois and Dylan butting heads frequently in the studio, so far his next record, Under The Red Sky, he went back to just getting a bunch of famous friends to guest on his album. That’s why I ended up putting those tracks on last week’s playlist/blog. Under The Red Sky, while not as bad as Down In The Groove or Knocked Out Loaded, quickly killed whatever career momentum Daniel Lanois had given him.

So Bob took a few years off, writing no new material for seven years and only recording a couple of solo acoustic albums of folk covers (which we will delve into next week). By the time, Dylan finally felt inspired to write again, we swallowed his pride, bit his tongue, and hired Daniel Lanois again.

And once again it worked. Time Out Of Mind got all sorts of attention and Grammies and awards. Of course, it probably helped that Bob nearly died of a weird fungal infection in his heart right before the album came out. It was a bold marketing move, and also cast a pall of mortality that only added to the album’s mystique.

While 1989’s Oh Mercy and 1997’s Time Out Of Mind might not have been consecutive chronologically, the two fit together quite well. Lanois’s production style, a swampy, eerie soundscape, unites the two albums in theme and tone. Plus the popular conception of both of these records as something of a pair of comebacks, pairs them nicely as well.

Bob learned his lesson, and realized that if he wanted to avoid working with Daniel Lanois again (which it certainly seems he did) he was going to have to wait until he had a good album he wanted to record instead of merely pumping out product every year because it was what was expected of him.