Bob Dylan's last three studio albums—1997's Time
Out of Mind,
2001's "Love and Theft", and 2006's Modern Times—are among his finest, but
that doesn't guarantee that their outtakes would add much to his legacy. But Tell
Tale Signs,
two CDs of scraps from those albums (along with some from 1989's Oh Mercy, plus some live
recordings) deserves to be considered an album, because it moves like one. Most
of these alternate takes are in fact completely different arrangements: "Someday
Baby" is a slow, wounded shuffle here, rather than the hard-chugging blues-rock
from Modern Times,
while two versions of Time's "Mississippi," each opening a CD, sound nothing
like the "official" rendition—or one another. It's easy to understand why
Dylan left some of these songs off the albums: The woozy "Born In Time"
wouldn't have fit the spookier tone of Oh Mercy, but it's got too much
life in it to have stayed put. But why "Dreamin' Of You," a shattered-love song
set to a hushed-roar arrangement, was left off Time is hard to figure. The
in-concert stuff provides snazzy contrast to the studio songs: "High Water (For
Charley Patton)" and "Lonesome Day Blues" crackle and snarl, with Dylan's lead
guitar speaking its own tongue. As Dylan's official bootlegs go, this is one of
the series' best.