From Robyn on Patreon in 2023
“Shadows are falling, and I’ve been here all day.” A bottoming-out song on a bottoming-out record. When I first heard “Time Out Of Mind” it upset me mightily; how outrageous, I thought, that somebody as exalted as Bob Dylan should feel like a wretched lump of middle-aged flesh washed up on the bleak shore of existence. Didn’t he know how loved he was, by millions of us? Did all that adoration do nothing to buoy him up?

But after a while I reluctantly began to let the record sink into me. We all have our own personal Bob, and that’s probably a large part of his problem: how can you live peacefully with a mosaic of misconceptions about you, all mirroring a version of yourself that you’ve already discarded? The Dylan you hear on a new record is never quite the same creature that you learned to love on the previous one.

“Not Dark Yet” was the first of these new songs to get to me. I lay on a hotel bed in Seattle one night in late August 1997 as the dusk powdered into the room, grain by grain, and on TV the news of Princess Diana’s car crash in Paris slipped into the announcement of her death. Over and over I played that song on my Walkman, fumbling with the rewind on it - sometimes it reversed direction and played the other side of the tape. I don’t miss Walkmans much. Eventually it did get completely dark outside and I shuffled out into the Belltown night, to watch Sleater-Kinney play at the Crocodile…

I’ve been singing this song myself for 26 years - almost half as long as I’ve been singing “Visions of Johanna.” I’ve customised it a little, though nothing like as much as Dylan tinkers with his own material. Whatever is happening in my life, or in the world outside, “Not Dark Yet” matches it - and after this, there’s nowhere else to go but up…

Recorded and mixed by Charlie Francis at Stwdio Penty. Voice and guitars by RH.