Time Out of Mind

Tom Petty, you already mentioned Wildflowers, which I think is his greatest album.

Springsteen, Bob Dylan put out Time Out of Mind, which was his best album in 20 years or something like that.

And also introduced the world Wilco, Nine Inch Nails, Green Day, Metallica, Rage Against the Machine.

And Neil Young put out a great record.

I'm Chris Melanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series.

On today's show, 40 years ago, in the early fall of 1986, Paul Simon debuted on the album chart with an LP that probably shouldn't have even existed.

The album was called Graceland.

The Mississippi Delta was shining like a national guitar.

And it was the best-selling world beat LP by a Western artist, back when the very term world beat was still being defined.

Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee, I'm going to Graceland.

The very existence of this album, a mix of Township Jive and other African sounds from a U.S. boomer folk rock icon, was incredibly improbable.

It is far and away the best-selling album of Paul Simon's solo career, now certified five times platinum in America alone.

say Wilco's been a band for 30 years, and depending on when you discover them, you might get turned on to a specific record, but then whatever record comes out around the time that you get into them or start seeing them, that one's going to resonate with you.

I had that myself, discovering Bob Dylan when I'm in college, when Time Out of Mind came out, and that's my era of Bob.

I saw him 20 some odd times between like 97 and 2005 or something yeah so those those records like i i will say love and death is the best record bob dylan ever made because that's my bob dylan record you know yeah um and it's cool to see that like with our band too people who've come on like if they were digging the band in 2019 was the first time they saw us like that record might resonate for them or you know it's it's cool to to see how that works, you know, for artists with long careers.

Yeah, totally.

But, you know, we end up with Oh Mercy.

We end up with Time Out of Mind, which is a top five album, probably.

I mean, I'll stick my neck out there in terms of Dylan.

And we end up with Love and Theft.

Is that more true today than it was in 89? Of course.

Yeah.

yeah you know again you know better than most on your side of the pond yeah i mean it's just yeah it's unbelievable and and i i love hearing about people's experiences of the album i mean your experience of the album fantastic i mean i compare that to my experience of time out of mind which you say that oh mercy was your first like um uh yeah since when contemporaneous yeah yeah After I had

my Dylan revelation, that was the first album of 10 new songs.

Paul McCartney.

OK Computer, Radiohead, The Day by Babyface, This Fire by Paula Cole, Time Out of Mind by Bob Dylan.

Oh, man, that's a good list.

Man, I mean, I want to take Radiohead, Bob Dylan, and who was the first one that you listed? Flaming Pie by Paul McCartney.

Babyface is going to win.

Let's go, Babyface.

Time Out of Mind by Bob Dylan is our winner.

Yes.

...

the Modern Times/Time Out of Mind, you, you, you call it the Disney Vulture, which I-

Yeah

... laughed out loud.

Mm-hmm.

How they morph from writing to recording to production to performance to, uh, you know, the, the, the 200th or 837th performance of a song.

How even with the current tour, you might see a setlist that looks fairly similar from night to night, but the, the show can feel entirely different.

Right.

You can play engineer in the-

[laughs]

... recording studio and-

It's really cool