Favorite Bob Dylan 80s, 90s and 00s albums.

In other words, get all of them but leave Knocked Out Loaded/Down In the Groove for last.

Although somebody will eventually pop in to say they're great, just to be weird.

 

Oh Mercy
Time Out Of Mind
Love And Theft
Shadows In The Night

 

Well for latter-day Dylan for me it's not what you love, but what you love best.
I will admit to being biased toward Modern Times (and to Dylan's more recent catalog in general) because it's the first album I was introduced to.
Having previously only heard Dylan's radio hits, this album blew me away pretty much from the first listen (and from the first song Thunder on the Mountain). I like your description "shows all the seams". I prefer my musical gems unpolished. My impression was that the musicianship was excellent and authentic and that there hadn't been a lot of futzing around with overdubs. The band was cohesive/ "in the pocket" and the vocal, while unorthodox, was masterful. Everything just seemed to fit for me.
Also lyrically at the time Most of the Time could've been me singing, just from where I was at my time in my life. It's like Dylan took the words right out of my mouth - except that he had a Nobel laureate level of word choice.
I do prefer the Tell Tale signs version of Most of the Time however. It's a little more raw and I like the vocal a lot more too. It comes across as almost a totally different song - much more powerful to me than the Modern Times version.

 

When I say Modern Times, to me, shows it's seams, I'm not talking about the music performance or production. I'm talking about the composition. Dylan's writing technique has often involved grabbing stuff from all kind of other sources -- folk songs and blues songs and literature and movies -- and putting them to his own uses.

Often it is/was stuff that most of us wouldn't recognize as borrowed on first pass, maybe because the source was pretty obscure (like the like in Stuck Inside of Mobile about the railroad men drinking up your blood like wine). It's caused controversy over his career -- like when people started to realize there were a lines from hardboiled movies populating Empire Burlesque, and most of all of late with his paintings, where it's not uncommon for him to paint a version of some other artists' photo, even a very famous one, an title it something completely else and hang it in a "painted from life" exhibit; is he conning us? Is the charade part of the art? Or is he just a charlatan?

In his latter day period, in particular beginning with Love & Theft and following, Dylan's taken this kind of composing to the extreme. Entire song are written on top of the wholesale music of other songs -- not just blues vamps like "Trouble No More" or "Rollin' & Tumblin'" vamps, but Jelly Roll Morton's "Each Day" lifted whole for "Duquesne Whistle," Johnny & Jack's "Uncle John's Bongos" lifted whole for "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum." Chunks of lyrics pop up from other places -- I wasn't familiar with the work of Henry Timrod before the whole dust up surrounding Dylan's use of his work on Modern Times, but there's the Timrod stuff on that album. When it works it's kind of seamless, Dylan's derived works, part original, part collage, feel new, whole and his own, the references to and borrowings from past material mixing with contemporary references (the quotes from Henry Rollins on Tempest, the references to the movie Titanic, the Alicia Keyes standing in for Ma Rainey on "Thunder on the Mountain," Don Pasquale making a booty call) and original material together serving to create this sense of "everythingness" in Dylan's work, that it's connected to something ancient and perpetual in American music and culture: Whether that's on "Sugar Baby" or "Mississippi" or "Tempest." To me a lot of the songs on Modern Times though just feel kludged together with the takings so on the surface that it often feels to me like there's no there there and some of the stuff seem just kind of jammed in, like the borrowed lyrics in the chorus of Nettie Moore, or one of the lines on the album that's original I guess, though as poetic as Marx: "the buying power of the proletariat's gone down." Everything on that album -- and maybe Modern Times reference to the fact -- it feels like comes from somewhere else (and music of the music does, blues songs, old '30s tunes like "Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day" or "Red Sails in the Sunset." In any given one place it may kind of work, but across the whole album, to me, listening to it, it just sounds to me like an album that's been Frankensteined together. That's what I mean about the seams showing.

As to "Most of the Time," I agree that's a fine song, but its from Oh Mercy 17 years earlier than Modern Times. Maybe you were thinking about a different song?

 

Sure, it's not a bad record. He sings the songs with conviction. And if it hits you where you live, it hits you where you live. For me, it's not an album I dislike, but it's not a record that sticks in my craw or that I find myself returning to, except for those two performances and the lovely sonic qualities of it. And it's not like I don't listen to people singing and playing standards, I do listen to that kind of music, a lot, more than I listen to rock and roll.

 

Clear favorites here.

80s - Infidels, Oh Mercy
90s - Time Out Of Mind
00s - Love And Theft

 

Wow great post I learned a lot. The song I was thinking of was Someday Baby which of course supports your point, being an example of a reworked blues classic - Someday Baby Blues/ Trouble No More.

But I just love the sound of this Modern Times! I benefit from a limited musical experience and so I never noticed the Frankenstein effect. And its more than OK by me if Dylan borrows and builds.

 

I listened to Oh Mercy twice at work today - what a great album. "Where Teardrops Fall" and "Most of the Time" stood out most.

Time Out of Mind is next!

 

I do like Death is Not the End and Silvio though!

 

Been enjoying Time Out of Mind today, particularly "Standing in the Doorway" and "Highlands"

 

Those are two of the big four on the album in my view. "Not Dark Yet" and "Tryin' To Get To Heaven" as well.

 

That's funny - if I was going to include two more in my above post, it would have been those two.

 

Bob thinks "Love Sick" is the best song about lost love he ever wrote so his opinion differs as I am sure would others.

 

80s - Oh Mercy
90s - Time Out Of Mind
00s - Modern Times
10s - Tempest

"Not Dark Yet" has been one of my top five Dylan songs for a long time.

 

Infidels --- 1983
Oh Mercy ---1989

The Bootleg Series Vol 1 - 3 --- 1991 Box Set
Time Out Of Mind --- 1997

Love & Theft --- 2001
Modern Times --- 2006
The Bootleg Series Vol 8 (Tell Tale Signs) --- 2008

Tempest --- 2012
The Bootleg Series Vol 10 (Another Self Portrait) --- 2013

 

'80s: Oh Mercy (lots of great individual songs from the 80's but most of the albums are spotty)
'90s: Time Out Of Mind (really enjoy GAIBTY and WGW as well)
'00s: Love And Theft (but Modern Times has held up well and has grown on me)

 

80s: Shot of Love (narrowly over Infidels)
90s: Time Out of Mind
00s: "Love and Theft"

 

80s Oh Mercy
90s Time Out Of Mind
00s Love And Theft
Modern Times
Together Through Life

As far as I can tell no one so far has recommended Together Through Life. I love the way David Hidalgo's accordeon complements the band and gives a melodic foil to Bob's sad, whimsical and funny tunes.

The Tell Tale Signs bootleg series album covers a lot of this period marvellously and, as has been mentioned by others, contains the fascinating guitar and harp version of Most Of The Time, still produced by Daneil Lanois, but brought back to basics for the instrumentation, giving it more warmth.