Oh Mercy - Writing and Recording

Writing and Recording

While recovering from a hand injury in December 1987, Dylan wrote "Political World", his first new song in a long time. According to his autobiography, the lyrics for "Political World" came to him spontaneously and were easy to write; though no melody was composed, he came up with 20 verses.

The onset of inspiration did not stop there. Days later (during the first week of 1988), he wrote verses for a second song, "What Good Am I?", over the course of one evening. The next day, he wrote another called "Dignity". Unlike his previous two songs, "Dignity" was written with the rhythm, tempo, and melody all in Dylan's head. Completed over the course of an afternoon and evening, Dylan composed the song after hearing of Pete Maravich's death.

Over the next month or so, Dylan composed many more songs (20 by his estimate), including "Everything Is Broken", "Disease of Conceit", and "What Was It You Wanted?" Melodies were written for only a few of them. In the meantime, Dylan's injured hand was healing well; he was encouraged by his doctor to play guitar again. Dylan began playing concerts again soon after his recovery.

As Clinton Heylin reports, while promoting The Traveling Wilburys in the fall of 1988, George Harrison discussed some of Dylan's upcoming work. "Harrison enthused about Dylan's new songs...informing a skeptical world that the experience of recording the Wilburys had given him the urge to write again."

Harrison was not the only peer to receive a preview of Dylan's next album. Earlier that year, Bono, lead singer of U2, paid Dylan a visit at his home. When he asked Dylan if he had written any new songs, Dylan showed him the ones stored in his drawer. Bono urged him to record the songs, but Dylan was reluctant.

In a 1989 interview, Dylan said, "Bono...suggested that Daniel could really record them right. Daniel came to see me when we were playing in New Orleans last year and...we hit it off. He had an understanding of what my music was all about. It’s very hard to find a producer that can play...and knows how to record with modern facilities. For me, that was lacking (in) the past."

Daniel Lanois was known for his work on high-profile projects like Peter Gabriel's So and U2's The Joshua Tree. He had also produced the self-titled debut of Dylan's one-time collaborator, Robbie Robertson. Dylan would first meet Lanois in September 1988, during a stop on the Never Ending Tour. Lanois was producing a session for The Neville Brothers, who were in the middle of recording Yellow Moon, an album that included "Ballad of Hollis Brown" and "With God on Our Side." Held in a portable studio set up in an old colonial house in New Orleans, the session gave Dylan a firsthand look at what it would be like to work with Lanois. Dylan already liked the idea of recording in New Orleans, and witnessing Lanois at work ethic Dylan to enlist him as producer.

Six months later, Dylan began holding sessions, first at a house in Emlah Court, then to Soniat Street where they spent the bulk of their time. "We found an empty turn-of-the-century apartment building — a five-story building, a fantastic place", recalls Lanois. "It had a bordello-ish overtone. We essentially turned the control room into a swamp...we had moss all over the place and stuffed animals and alligator heads...On the record there's not really the obvious presence of synthesizers, just straight-ahead drums and bass and guitars, yet there's this blazing strangeness around it."

Dylan did not want to use his touring band, so Lanois recruited a number of local musicians for these sessions, including guitarists Mason Ruffner and Brian Stoltz, bassist Tony Hall, and drummer Willie Green. However, much of the activity revolved around three performers: Dylan, Lanois, and engineer Malcolm Burn. Lanois himself played dobro, lap steel, guitar, and even omnichord throughout the sessions. Burn occasionally handled tambourine, keyboards, and bass, and he was later given co-production credit. "Daniel just allowed the record to take place any old time, day or night. You don't have to walk through secretaries, pinball machines and managers and hangers-on in the lobby and parking lots and elevators and arctic temperatures", Dylan said.

"With all records there comes a time when people get a little bit lazy, because it's a tiring and unnatural process", Lanois said. "There came a time with Bob Dylan when I felt he fell into old habits—'Get somebody else to play on it,' he'd say, or 'just hire somebody,' when really he should have been playing the parts. And I made it clear to him that we weren't going to fly anybody in, and we weren't going to have session players play these parts. The parts would be played by the people in the room, by himself, by myself, by the engineer Malcolm Burn, by the neighborhood guys that we'd chosen to be on the record. It was not going to be a studio record. He was going to play the parts, and if they were a little sloppy they would be accepted that way."

As Dylan would later detail in his autobiography, the sessions were very difficult. The first day was spent recording "Political World", which Lanois pushed in a 'funky' direction. Dylan did not like the arrangement, and the next day, he discovered that Lanois and the others had continued working on "Political World" even after he left. The mix and overdubs finished in Dylan's absence were not to his liking, and his disappointment grew as they continued to experiment with the arrangement and the mix. Dylan felt the whole process was more difficult than it should be and that Lanois was not communicating very well; at one point, Lanois destroyed a dobro in a fit of rage.

Eventually, "Political World" was set aside and the group focused on another song, "Most of the Time", which still needed a melody. They composed one fairly quickly, but as work continued, Dylan became more dissatisfied with the results.

They moved on to the next song, "Dignity", which was recorded with Dylan, Stoltz, and Green. Though they managed to complete a polished performance, Lanois suggested something more ambitious with a Cajun band. Curious to see what Lanois had in mind, Dylan agreed to recut the song. The next evening, a session was held with Rockin' Dopsie and His Cajun Band, but the results were disastrous. The group experimented with different keys and tempos, but according to Dylan, everyone was frustrated with the results. Dylan still preferred the original version recorded the previous day, but it was not considered finished by Dylan or Lanois. (In his autobiography, Dylan refers to the original version as a "demo".) As the session continued into the early morning hours, the group gave up and began playing old standards like "Jambalaya", "Your Cheatin' Heart", and "There Stands the Glass." It was during this time that Dylan tried out another new song, "Where Teardrops Fall". "I showed it quickly to Dopsie and we recorded it", Dylan later wrote. "Took about five minutes and it wasn't rehearsed."

The next day, they listened to every take of "Dignity" recorded with Dopsie and his band, and all of them were rejected. "Whatever promise Dan had seen in the song was beaten into a bloody mess", Dylan recalled. "Where we had started from, we'd never gotten back to, a fishing expedition gone nowhere. In no take did we ever turn back the clock. We just kept winding it. Every take another ball of confusion."

However, Dylan was struck by their recording of "Where Teardrops Fall", and even though Lanois insisted on recutting it (which they did), Dylan eventually went back to the original version and used it for the album. In the meantime, "Dignity" was set aside, never to be revisited for the remainder of the sessions.

The next song was "Series of Dreams", and "although Lanois liked the song, he liked the bridge better, wanted the whole song to be like that", wrote Dylan. "I knew what he meant, but it just couldn't be done. Though I thought about it for a second, thinking that I could probably start with the bridge as the main part and use the main part as the bridge...the idea didn't amount to much and thinking about the song this way wasn't healthy. I felt like it was fine the way it was — didn't want to lose myself in thinking too much about changing it." Lanois would continue to experiment with the song, but Dylan ultimately left it off the album.

Other songs were also finished with compromises; Dylan wasn't satisfied with the melody on "What Good Am I?" and felt the tempo was too slow, while Lanois wasn't enthusiastic about "Everything Is Broken", believing it to be an insignificant song.

"I wasn't looking to express myself in any kind of new way", Dylan would later write. "All my ways were intact and had been for years. There wasn't much chance in changing now. I didn't need to climb the next mountain. If anything, what I wanted to do was to secure the place where I was at. I wasn't sure Lanois understood that. I guess I never made it plain, couldn't put it in so many words."

Despite the arguments with Lanois, Dylan was genuinely pleased with the production, and not everything was recorded with difficulty. "Ring Them Bells" was finished quickly with ease, and Dylan was very happy with the result.

During the course of the sessions, Dylan would also write two more songs, "Shooting Star" and "Man in the Long Black Coat"; he finished both after a brief respite with his wife outside of New Orleans and would include both on the album.

Roughly fourteen or fifteen songs were recorded at these sessions, with many of the basic tracks cut live to tape. One major exception was the lead vocals; all but two songs had their live vocals replaced by overdubs accommodating new lyrics written for the same songs.