I Feel Like A Stranger Nobody Sees

Bob Dylan “Mississippi” (Outtake from ‘Time Out Of Mind’ Sessions, Version 3)

A lot of great songs have a very defined architecture, and are specific to a particular palette, arrangement, and production style. A lot of the music I love the most is like that. But then there’s other types of songs that are more like a floating set of alluring lyrical and musical ideas that resist a permanent shape or strict form; ideas that are open to endless interpretation. This is Bob Dylan’s lane, and it’s a lot of why his music has lent itself to being covered by a wide range of artists from the start of his career in the early 1960s. But it’s also how he’s approached his own body of work – songs going through many revisions before he settled on a studio arrangement, songs being reinvented for the stage, songs taking different shapes as his voice has changed through his life.

Bob Dylan worked on “Mississippi” for a long time before landing on the version that appears on “Love and Theft” in 2001. This means there’s a lot of recordings of the song at different stages of Dylan’s writing and arranging process, and this one from the Time Out of Mind sessions is my favorite. Other iterations of “Mississippi” lean more folk or country, but this one feels lighter and sweeter than the others. Of the three recordings of the song from the Time Out of Mind sessions, it’s the one that’s most obviously the work of producer Daniel Lanois. You can hear the Lanois-ness in the sharp tonal contrasts – warm, womb-y bass offset with a crisp, bright tone in the lead guitar and a trebly organ part that guides a few dynamic shifts as the song moves through a long series of verses.

Simply put, this recording feels amazing. It’s the kind of track that can immediately change the atmosphere of a room or cleanse your mood. I figure Dylan thought this version was too Lanois-ish and not quite what he was reaching for, but I think it’s one of the finest recordings in his massive body of work. Or maybe he just wasn’t set on what the song was yet, as about 40% of the lyrics are different from the final studio recording for “Love and Theft.” But I think I prefer the lyrics in this form too.

“Mississippi,” like “Tangled Up in Blue” before it, is essentially a love song that exists on a very long timeline in which the lives of the protagonist and the object of his affection only seem to sporadically intersect. It’s a portrait of a guy who’s been through a lot of turmoil, and has spent a lot of time alone. You don’t really get a sense of this woman, only just that she’s been a safe port in a storm and something for him to hold on to as he makes his way through the world. The beautiful and sad thing about this song for me is that his love for her seems to be more important to him than having a proper relationship with her. But he’s yearning for that, and by the end of the song he’s practically begging her for the stability.

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