Highlands aka Late night musings on lena dunham and bob dylan courtesy of others...(chris morris's wasted space)

He almost died after making this. That's a good opening line. 
(Note: dylan was only 56 when he recorded this album. Not seventy eighty ninety. Fuck.)

But if Time Out of Mind was filled with Chaos and Old Night, its final track presented something like a dawning. “Highlands” is a song that doesn’t play well in a living room; its 16-minutes-plus length is taxing if you’re inert, and its loping, endlessly recycling structure can lull you right out of the plot, such as it is. I learned that it played best if you were listening to it during a long walk, because Bob is out for a stroll in the song, too. He’s restless, dissatisfied, bored, lonely; his mind is flitting around, and he’s itching for something he can’t put his finger on. He can’t just sit at home, because the neighbors tell him to turn down the Neil Young album he’s playing (Zuma?Ragged Glory?). Shopping doesn’t look like it’ll get the job done, either, though a full-length leather coat might be nice. He stops into a diner for a break, and gets into a flirtatious tiff with a pretty, caustic waitress who doesn’t admire his drawing skills and implies he’s a sexist. Did Robert Burns have days like this one?

Rambling around town with Dylan can be some funny shit, in spite of the darkness of his mood. It’s a new style for him – declarative, dialog-based, and it gives him to us at the most human level, bemused, pissed-off, distracted, alert to the annoying and the engaging elements of humdrum existence. It lifts the weight off the rest of the album; in the end you can see some sun shining on his back door. Even if it isn’t quite bright enough for him, “that’s good enough for now.”

What an elegant and accomplished thing this record is. The artistic dimensions of the man are audible in virtually every second of it.

Late that year, I went to see Dylan at the tiny El Rey Theatre in L.A. People watched the gig with their mouths hanging open. I was upstairs in the VIP section, and I was so transfixed I wasn’t aware of my surroundings. During one break between songs, I turned my head, and found that I was standing next to Joni Mitchell.