Mississippi

The primary passage says material recorded for Time Out of Mind was excluded when producer Daniel Lanois believed the album would be overloaded. Mississippi is the named example, and the note judges it arguably better than any song on the beloved TOOM.

That judgement gives the hard-core Realists a practical reason not to stop at the released album. If the strongest recording can remain outside the object treated as scripture, the border of the canon is evidence of selection rather than proof of value.

Time Out of Mind seems an obvious choice because of its comeback status and its proximity in the papers to the New York Post’s Bob Dylan heart-scare headline. The note folds that headline into the same day as the Cruise of Deception and credits the newspaper with the dignity to lead with something else.

The comic historical pile-up is part of the method. Public headline, private health fear, album mythology and in-world cruise chronology occupy the same file. Mississippi enters as the withheld song capable of disturbing all four versions of the official story.

Elsewhere in the working copy, the Cruise of Deception moves along the Mississippi Delta and generates recollocations, including an alternate Days of Our Lives directed by David Lynch with Mississippi as its theme. The source acknowledges the excess of references while continuing to accumulate them.

The Delta therefore functions as a route through incompatible records: soap chronology, Lynchian repetition, cruise itinerary and Dylan outtake. The song’s exclusion from the album makes it especially suited to a history that keeps returning what its official edition left out.