Trouble In Mind: Bob Dylan's Gospel Years - What Really Happened

"Trouble in Mind, documents the tours and recording sessions with an obsessive detail that, at the very least, encourages the reader to come at it all afresh. . . . his interrogation of what it was all for is, to fans like me, highly illuminating." ―NewStatesman

Between 1979 and 1981, Dylan produced and released three of his most controversial albums―Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love―toured the world, and played the most contentious shows of his career. Remarkably, this entire period was perhaps the most fastidiously well-documented of his career, with every studio session, every live show, and every single rehearsal recorded on Dylan’s behalf. For the first time, that material has been excavated, reviewed, and accessed by “perhaps the world’s leading authority on all things Dylan” (Rolling Stone).

Serving as an invaluable companion to the latest Sony Bootleg Series (November 2017), Trouble in Mind is the first book to focus on the life and works of Dylan as a born-again Christian from the perspective of both his artistic growth and the development of his eschatological worldview. It will draw on previously undocumented song drafts, rehearsal tapes, and new interviews with engineers, musicians, and girlfriends.

Aside from his definitive biography, Dylan Behind the Shades (Simon & Schuster, 1991; new edition HarperCollins, 2001), which remains in print more than twenty years after publication, Clinton Heylin has published multiple books on Dylan. He has been an invited speaker at Dylan conventions around the world and was chosen as the annotator of the 2013 forty-nine CD box set Dylan’s Complete Columbia Recordings by Sony, for which he was nominated for the 2014 ASCAP Drew Taylor Award.