Bob Dylan Revives “Not Dark Yet” After a Seven-Year Gap

By Grace Kim

At Mitsubishi Electric Hall in Dusseldorf, Germany, on October 27, Bob Dylan played “Not Dark Yet” live for the first time in seven years, Rolling Stone reported.

Rolling Stone placed the concert six shows into Dylan’s Lights of Autumn European fall tour. The magazine also noted his habit of dropping surprises, large and small, into each show.

The performance lasted 4 minutes 30 seconds. It came two minutes shorter than the 1997 studio recording, although Dylan sang every verse. The report counted 191 earlier live renditions over the previous three decades and said this version sounded nothing like them in both length and character.

Rolling Stone heard a slight reggae touch and much less of the somber atmosphere that usually defines “Not Dark Yet.” It said lines such as “sometimes my burden is more than I can bear” and “I know it looks like I’m movin’, but I’m standin’ still” now sounded bright and even optimistic.

What does this change for fans of Time Out of Mind?

For listeners, the practical change is concrete: Dylan retained every verse but shortened the song by two minutes, lightened its mood and altered its rhythmic feel. The report’s point was not that he had replaced the song. He had rebuilt its live balance.

That rebuilding fits Dylan’s wider treatment of the album. At recent tour stops, Rolling Stone said, he introduced new arrangements of “Trying to Get to Heaven” and “Million Miles.” The magazine described Time Out of Mind as launching an entirely new era in his career; the album also won the Grammy for Album of the Year.

Dylan had long objected to producer Daniel Lanois’s arrangements. In 2001, he told Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore:

“[The album] got off the tracks more than a few times, and people got frustrated,”

“I got so frustrated in the studio that I didn’t really dimensionalize the songs. I could’ve if I’d had the willpower. I just didn’t at that time, and so you got to steer it where the event itself wants to go.”

“I feel there was a sameness to the rhythms. It was more like that swampy, voodoo thing that Lanois is so good at. I just wish I’d been able to get more of a legitimate rhythm-oriented sense into it…It was tricky trying to steer that ship.”

That criticism supplies the mechanism behind the current changes. In nearly 30 years since Time Out of Mind, Dylan produced all his records under the pseudonym Jack Frost (an assumed name), Rolling Stone said. The report cast that production control as a way for Dylan to steer the material after Lanois shaped the original sessions.

His 2023 box set of session recordings, The Bootleg Series Vol. 17: Fragments – Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996–1997), revisited the album’s songs. Rolling Stone said Dylan had essentially stripped away Lanois’s “swampy, voodoo thing.”

“What we wanted to do was find a different way to look at Time Out of Mind, to contextualize it,” a source close to the Dylan camp told Rolling Stone. “We also wanted it to sound more natural and less processed.”

Rolling Stone identified “Dirt Road Blues” as the only Time Out of Mind song Dylan had never played live. The report suggested he might break it out on the European run. It also called a first “Highlands” performance since 2001 momentous, while noting how difficult that scenario was to imagine.

For encores, Rolling Stone would settle for “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)” and Dylan’s cover of Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927.” Both songs appeared at the opening night in Oslo, Norway, then dropped from the set. The report expected time for their return before the tour ended.

The next test is whether Dylan extends the reworking beyond “Not Dark Yet.” Rolling Stone reported that his European fall tour would end on December 8 at London’s Royal Festival Hall, where Dylan last played in 1964. A reworked “Dirt Road Blues” or “Highlands” in London would show that Dusseldorf began a broader revision.