In Part Three we suggested breaking FRAGMENTS into a series of albums or playlists. In this and the next few posts we’ll dive deeper into each of these.
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It Begins Before It Starts
When Bob Dylan realized sometime in the very early 1990’s that it was time to shed the past again, he didn’t rush forward. Instead he looked back and recorded a pile of great old songs - Good As I’ve Been To You, and World Gone Wrong - at his home studio in 1992 and 1993.
Four years later - presumably inspired or at least re-invigorated by focusing on those old songs, he wrote and recorded Time Out Of Mind.
So it is interesting and fitting that the recording that opens the FRAGMENTS Outtakes disks is not a Dylan song, but one that can be traced back hundreds of years. The Water Is Wide is not new to Bob Dylan, but here we get an absolutely gorgeous version from mid-August 1996.
This beautifully sung and meditative version certainly doesn’t immediately sound like Time O…