David Bowie's love affair with Bob Dylan's Time out of Mind
David Bowie’s secret dialogue with Bob Dylan and the miracle chord that ties them together.
It’s just a hunch, but I think David Bowie deep-dived Time out of Mind, in fact so deep and for so long that when he returned to the surface the experience coated his own stylings like a new layer of skin, specifically influencing some of The Next Day, Blackstar and his play, Lazarus. Some of these suspicions would later be confirmed by novelist Michael Cunningham. Following Bowie’s 2004 heart attack, Bowie began a collaboration with Cunningham and according to him:
“David reluctantly told me that he imagined the musical taking place in the future… the plot would revolve around a stockpile of unknown, unrecorded Bob Dylan songs, which had been discovered after Dylan died. David himself would write the hitherto-unknown songs.” — Michael Cunningham speaking to GQ
The original project slowed to a halt as Bowie continued to suffer through heart problems and it was abandoned altogether. Part of the conc…
