Producing Bob Dylan

"I started out when you could just go into the studio and record your songs and leave. I don't know when that changed."

When it comes to recording, Bob Dylan likes to get in and out of the studio as quickly as possible. As he revealed in a 1999 interview with Guitar World:

“The recording process is very difficult for me. I lose my inspiration in the studio real easy, and it's very difficult for me to think that I'm going to eclipse anything I've ever done before. I get bored easily, and my mission, which starts out wide, becomes very dim after a few failed takes and this and that.”

It wasn’t always this way: the various producers of Dylan’s earliest records – John Hammond, Tom Wilson and Bob Johnston, respectively – appear to have given Bob a lot of freedom in the studio. The occasional overdub aside, Dylan’s first significant deviation from his preferred, everyone-playing-live-at-the-same-time style of recording arrived with Slow Train Coming in 1979. Working at Muscle Shoals Studios with producers Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett, Dylan was persuaded to record basic tracks for each song – including his lead vocal – which would then be heavily overdubbed with additional guitar, keyboard and horn parts. The resulting album is, by Dylan standards, unusually polished.

However, Bob would soon be back to his ramshackle ways. His next two albums, Saved (1980) and Shot of Love (1981), would be recorded with members of his touring band and feature a much more live sound, despite the presence of Wexler and Beckett (on Saved) and Chuck Plotkin (on Shot of Love) as producers. Guitarist Fred Tackett, who played on both albums, recalled what happened when then-up-and-coming producer Jimmy Iovine attempted to impose modern recording methods on the early Shot of Love sessions, in an interview with Tim Cumming in 2017:

“[W]e got a call from Jimmy Iovine, one of these guys who thought, if I could just get Bob in the studio with the A-team guys, and really do a good basic track, all that stuff. ‘It’ll be huge, it’ll be great’. So he got all of us down early to Studio 55, an old studio that they had redone. An A-team LA pop music studio of 1981. He put me and Dave Mansfield in a room at the back. I had mandolin, Dave was on fiddle, and they had Jim [Keltner] boxed in with baffles and all this stuff, everything separated, everything discrete, and eventually Bob shows up.... And then he goes, Fred, where are you, and I say, I’m back in this back room, and he goes, get your guitar and get out here. So all of a sudden there’s me and Steve Ripley and Keltner and all the baffles are gone, and we’re all sitting in a circle in the same room and we’re all playing live again, and we start going through tunes.”

Iovine departed the sessions and did not return.

Dylan’s next album, the Mark Knopfler co- produced Infidels (1983), was the first to bear hallmarks of burgeoning 1980s production techniques: the drums are louder, and Dylan’s vocals are coated in a thick layer of reverb. Bob had apparently considered the production services of David Bowie, Frank Zappa and Elvis Costello before choosing Knopfler, who was enjoying huge success as the guitarist and singer-songwriter of Dire Straits. The objective was clear: Bob Dylan wanted to update his sound for the 1980s. I think it works; the sound is of its time, but – to my ears, at least – never overwhelms the songs.

In sharp contrast to his usual recording practices, the follow-up to Infidels, Empire Burlesque, was recorded sporadically over the eight months between July 1984 and March 1985, with Dylan self-producing accompanied by a revolving cast of session musicians. Eventually, Dylan had accumulated enough material to present to remix extraordinaire Arthur Baker, who was tasked with tying all of the loose threads into a coherent whole. Baker did turn this collection of songs into a cohesive album, although the peak-1980s synth heavy sound continues to divide opinion today. Dylan took the album's disappointing commercial and performance hard. “I think he really loved that album," said engineer Josh Abbey in the documentary Both Ends of the Rainbow: Bob Dylan 1978-1989. "I think he was pretty disappointed that it didn’t sell big.”

Dylan’s next album, Knocked Out Loaded (1986), mainly featured a contemporary sound similar to Empire Burlesque, with the notable exception of 'Got My Mind Made Up', a Bo Diddley-esque rocker that found Bob backed by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. The stripped-back approach to this track carried over to Dylan’s 1988 album Down in the Groove, which leaned towards more of a traditional rock & roll sound. Dylan, however, was acutely aware that he needed to recharge his creative batteries. Both of these albums had charted poorly, and between them contained just four songs credited to him alone.

Help arrived in the form of Canadian producer Daniel Lanois, who came recommended by Dylan’s friend Bono of U2. Constructing a makeshift studio in a large house in New Orleans, Lanois created an environment that he hoped would be conducive to Dylan’s creativity. He also assembled a band. Gone were the army of session musicians and celebrity friends; for the first time since Infidels, Dylan would record an album over a concentrated period of time with a small group of musicians.

Initially, Dylan seemed reluctant to embrace Lanois’ methods, and appeared to be testing the limits of what the producer was willing to tolerate. “For the first two weeks, Bob was just strumming, not making chords, just kind of sloppily playing, and Dan was politely putting up with it,” recording engineer Mark Howard told Uncut magazine in 2008. “But there came this one point when Dan finally really lost it with him, and had a bit of a freak out. He just wanted Dylan to smarten up, and it became – not a yelling match, but it became uncomfortable in the studio. So [co-engineer] Malcolm [Burn] and me, we walked out and let them sort it out. And then, when we got back, from then on, Dylan was just really pleasant to work with.”

Dylan introduced a rule that all recording and mixing was to be done at night. Somehow, this nocturnal atmosphere seeped into the sound of the record, perhaps most prominently on 'Man in the Long Black Coat'. Dylan sings in a low, menacing whisper, and the music pulsates and shimmers behind him.

Deciding how to best capture Dylan’s voice had been a point of much discussion between Lanois and chief engineer Malcolm Burn during pre-production. Remembers Burn in Both Ends of The Rainbow: “That was the thing that we really spent a lot of time on, getting a really good vocal, a really present vocal sound. We didn’t spend too much time on anything else, technically speaking, at all, but definitely there was a fair amount of discussion and time spent on finding the right microphone, the right EQ, the right compressor, the right pre-amp, for the vocal.” The pared-down approach reaped rewards: while by no means a smash hit, the album was warmly received and returned Dylan to the Billboard top 30 for the first time since Infidels.

Rather than attempting to recreate Oh Mercy by working with Lanois again, Dylan entered the studio in January 1990 to begin work on an album produced by Don and David Was of the band Was (Not Was). In direct contrast to Lanois’ refusal to bring in special guests, the duo flooded the record, Under the Red Sky, with a dizzying array of superstar cameos: Elton John, Slash, George Harrison, Bruce Hornsby, David Crosby, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Jimmy Vaughn all make contributions. The sound, meanwhile, seemed to be an attempt to create a more polished version of Dylan’s mid-60s style. Don Was reflected on the experience in a 2015 interview with Something Else!:

“I was maybe a little out of my league, experience-wise, when I did Under the Red Sky. I was thinking like a fan. ‘Man, I loved Highway 61, it’d be great if he did something else like Highway 61!’ So, I’m trying to get him back to something, and he’s trying to look forward and do something different. Which is what you’re supposed to do! You’re not supposed to just imitate yourself, you’re supposed to do something new, that challenges you.”

Dylan’s response was to hit the reset button on his career as a recording artist. In mid-1992, having abandoned an album of covers recorded with the David Bromberg Band, Dylan entered his private studio with his friend Debbie Gold (who had previously worked as production co-ordinator on Shot of Love) and recording engineer Micajah Ryan. He emerged with Good as I Been to You, a solo acoustic album. In contrast to his output over the previous decade, this album was devoid of any kind of production whatsoever: just Bob's voice, his guitar and his repertoire of old songs.

The follow-up, 1993’s World Gone Wrong, is also an album of traditional music. This one, however, is a more produced affair; a little echo on Bob’s voice here and there, a touch of distortion on the guitar as if Bob were playing slightly too close to the microphone. The result is that these recordings sound old, as if they were discovered in a box of ancient 78rpm records exhumed from a long-forgotten box in someone’s basement.

After World Gone Wrong, Dylan did not record another studio album for another five years, instead devoting himself to live performance. When asked about this hiatus from recording in a September 1997 interview with John Pareles, Dylan responded that it had been down to “Disillusion with the whole process of it.” He continued:


“I started out when you could just go into the studio and record your songs and leave. I don’t know when that changed. But I found myself spending more and more time in the studio doing less and less. There wasn’t any gratification in it, really.”

It was clear that Dylan needed a producer who understood him, and could help him bring his new songs to fruition. Of the various producers Dylan had worked with over the previous two decades, one name stood out: Lanois. Dylan arranged a meeting, read Lanois the lyrics he had been writing, and asked the producer if he would help turn them into an album. Lanois accepted.

In much the same manner that he had converted a house into a recording studio for Oh Mercy, Lanois set about preparing the abandoned Teatro Theatre in Oxnard, Los Angeles, for Dylan to record in. Some initial sessions were held there, where Dylan was accompanied by Lanois and percussionist Tony Mangurian, before Dylan threw Lanois a devastating curveball. Seemingly on a whim, Dylan decided that he was uncomfortable recording so close to home and would prefer to make the album at Criteria Studios in Miami, Florida – more or less as far away from LA as one can get while still being in the United States. Having largely submitted to the producer’s recording methods on Oh Mercy, it appeared that Dylan was keen to make it clear that, this time around, he was in control.

“I think in many ways Time Out of Mind was his resolution with Lanois over Oh Mercy”, said keyboardist Jim Dickinson, who played on the album, to Uncut in 2008. “I think there were issues unresolved over Oh Mercy that he was determined to resolve.”

The recording sessions were, by all accounts, contentious, as Dylan and Lanois clashed repeatedly over the direction of the album. Both men called in their own set of musicians, meaning that there were often more than ten people playing live on each track. The end result represents an intriguing halfway point between Dylan’s preferred rhythm and blues influenced style, and the moody, atmospheric soundscapes favoured by Lanois. 

Dylan later expressed some reservations about the sound of the album. At a Rome press conference four years later, he reflected: “My recollection of that record is that it was a struggle. A struggle every inch of the way. Ask Daniel Lanois, who was trying to produce the songs. Ask anyone involved in it. They all would say the same [....] Repeatedly, I’d find myself compromising this to get to that. As a result, though it held together as a collection of songs, that album sounds to me a little off. There's a sense of some wheels going this way some wheels going that, but hey, we're just about getting there.”

Despite the critical and commercial success of Time Out of Mind, Dylan understandably wondered if there might be an easier way of making a successful record. While he had spent most of the previous two decades relying on producers to help him sound contemporary, the resolutely old-fashioned Time Out of Mind had been his biggest success in years. The thought must have flashed through his mind repeatedly: did he really need a producer?

The chance to find out arrived when Bob agreed to provide a song, “Things Have Changed”, for Curtis Hanson’s film Wonder Boys in 2000. Without a producer attempting to impose their vision on the music, Dylan was able to steer the sound squarely towards the rhythm and blues that he loved. However, Bob still had one eye on the cutting edge, recruiting a young engineer named Chris Shaw after discovering that he had worked with Public Enemy.

'Things Have Changed' set the template for Bob’s new style of recording, which was remarkably similar to how he had made albums in the sixties and seventies: a small group of musicians performing live in the same room over a short period of time, overseen by a Dylan who had a clear idea of what he wanted. By the mid 2000s, Shaw had introduced Dylan to the digital editing software ProTools, which sped up the recording process considerably. Bob had also reached a point where he was comfortable bringing his excellent touring band into the studio.

Since “Things Have Changed”, Dylan’s approach to recording appears to have largely remained the same, although behind the scenes details are generally kept securely under wraps by those involved. Some of the most revealing insights into Dylan’s production style have come from legendary engineer Al Schmitt, who recorded Dylan’s three albums of Great American Songbook standards: Shadows in the Night (2015), Fallen Angels (2016) and Triplicate (2016). Speaking about Shadows in the Night to Sound on Sound in 2015, Schmitt recalled:

“A lot of the time was spent on making sure that each musician was playing the right parts, with the right performances. [….] Most of all, Dylan had his input in how he wanted things to be and how he wanted the guys to play. He was the producer, so he had total control of what went on. He would comment on tempo, on how the rhythm guitar played, what he wanted from the pedal steel, and so on.”

Dylan appears to have become comfortable producing himself, usually working under the pseudonym ‘Jack Frost’. However, Jim Dickinson expressed reservations about this approach in his 2008 interview with Uncut. “I think it says something that, since Time Out of Mind, he’s more or less chosen to produce himself. I’m not sure what it says, though. Production is for sure a part of the process that he doesn’t trust, but I personally think that self-production is a myth …. he’s denying himself the luxury of a relationship that can be good.”

Whether or not Dylan chooses to pursue that type of relationship again is anyone’s guess. On the whole, however, it seems that after years of searching for the right producer, the person he was looking for was himself all along.

Here's Daniel Lanois discussing his experience of producing Bob Dylan: