"Not Dark Yet" was recorded in the early sessions for Time Out of Mind in a version that featured "a radically different feel", according to Daniel Lanois. "[The demo of 'Not Dark Yet'] was quicker and more stripped-down and [later during the formal studio sessions], he changed it into a civil war ballad".[4]
In their book Bob Dylan All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track, authors Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon describe the album version, recorded at Criteria Studios in Miami in early 1997, as one where Lanois "uses multiple instruments to fuel a sonic vision that he alone has the talent and skill to create. All the musicians contribute to this sound: Augie Meyers's organ is scored; the two drummers provide a heavy, haunting tempo; and Tony Garnier on bass moves in the depths of the sound spectrum. The guitars confer a rock-music atmosphere on the piece, but also contribute to its dreamlike ambience. Dylan delivers one of his best vocal performances on the album, touched with sincerity and resignation".[5]
Critical reception
"Not Dark Yet" received widespread acclaim upon its release in 1997 with many critics citing it as the highlight of Time Out of Mind. The refrain "It's not dark yet but it's getting there" is often interpreted as Bob Dylan, or at least the song's first-person narrator, confronting his mortality.
Gilbert Cruz, writing in a Time magazine article about "The 10 Best Bob Dylan Songs", termed it "a moving end-of-life song written and sung by an aging artist who has somehow managed to remain vital".[6]
Rolling Stone ranked it 50th on a 2015 list of "The 100 Greatest Bob Dylan Songs", calling it "hauntingly beautiful" and noting that Dylan sang the lyric in "the weary and weathered voice of a man facing the twilight of his life".[7]
In the "Fortitude" chapter of his book Dylan's Visions of Sin, literary scholar Christopher Ricks wrote a lengthy analysis in which he compared the song to the John Keats poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn", whose narrator is likewise "half in love with easeful Death". Ricks claims that, broken down line for line, "similar turns of phrase, figures of speech, [and] felicities of rhyming" can be found throughout "Not Dark Yet" and the Ode. Ricks also argues that "there is a strong affinity with Keats in the way that in the song night colours, darkens, the whole atmosphere while never being spoken of", just as Keats used winter to color and darken the atmosphere in another poem he wrote, To Autumn. "Dylan's refrain or burden is 'It's not dark yet, but it's getting there'. He bears it and bares it beautifully, with exquisite precision of voice, dry humour, and resilience, all these in the cause of fortitude at life's going to be brought to an end by death".[8]
Spectrum Culture included the song on a list of "Bob Dylan's 20 Best Songs of the 90s". In an article accompanying the list, critic Peter Tabakis wrote, "The song’s languid, fatalistic beauty no doubt makes it his most beguiling composition since 'Blind Willie McTell'. Regret saturates every raspy couplet. Cynicism pervades this reflexive evaluation of a life lived. The Reaper’s a knock, knock, knockin’ on his front door." Yet Tabakis, writing in 2020, also noted that, in spite of the song's despairing tone, it provides catharsis: “'Not Dark Yet' offers succor, something like homeopathic medicine. There’s a reason many of us rushed to revisit Soderbergh’s Contagion when a real-life pandemic broke out earlier this year. That impulse goes straight back to Ancient Greece, to the birth of tragedy – catharsis. On 'Not Dark Yet', Dylan is at once our Aeschylus and Agamemnon, the tragedian and tragic hero. Bad shit may be timeless, but reality can, by contrast, be a little bit better than fiction. Cold comfort. And comforting, nonetheless".[9]
Ultimate Classic Rock critic Matthew Wilkening rated "Not Dark Yet" as the 3rd best song Dylan recorded between 1992 and 2011, praising it as "a stately, surprisingly clear-sung accounting of a painful life from a man who sees the end closing in on him".[10]
A 2021 Guardian article included it on a list of "80 Bob Dylan songs everyone should know".[11]
Music video
An official music video for the song, directed by Michael B. Borofsky, was filmed in Memphis, Tennessee, in October 1997. The video juxtaposes both color and black-and-white footage of Dylan and his band (including Larry Campbell on electric guitar and Bucky Baxter on pedal steel guitar), performing the song on stage at the New Daisy Theatre on Beale Street, with black-and-white footage of the city outside.[12] The video was released in March 1998, the month after Time Out of Mind won three Grammy Awards including one for Album of the Year. Another music video was shot for the song "Love Sick" at the same location on the same day, featuring Dylan and model Rachel DiPaolo, but it has never been released.[13]
Cultural references
The line "She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind" is a quote from the traditional folk song "Red River Shore".[14]
The line "I was born here and I'll die here against my will" is a paraphrase of a Talmudic passage from the Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), Chapter 4, verse 22: "Let not your heart convince you that the grave is your escape; for against your will you are formed, against your will you are born, against your will you live, against your will you die, and against your will you are destined to give a judgement and accounting before the king, king of all kings, the Holy One, blessed be He".[15]
Other versions
The Bootleg Series Vol. 17: Fragments - Time Out Of Mind Sessions (1996–1997), released on January 27, 2023, contains a version of the original album track remixed by Michael Brauer as well as two studio outtakes of the song and a live version from 2000.[16] On January 11, 2023, Dylan released a new video of one of the outtakes, in which the song is accompanied by a montage of archival photographs, to promote the album's release.[17]
^Jackson, Joe (1997) (20 April 2001). "Ruminations on Mortality". The Dylan Companion. Da Capo Press, 2001. pp. 306–09. ISBN0-306-80968-0.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
^Margotin, Philippe; Guesdon, Jean-Michel (27 October 2015). Bob Dylan : all the songs: the story behind every track (First ed.). New York. ISBN978-1-57912-985-9. OCLC869908038.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
