Album: Saved
Recorded: February 1980
Released: June 1980
Songs / length: 9 / 42:39
I remember buying this album on CD at an outdoor market in Verona as part of my year abroad as a student in Italy, with little idea of how it fits into Dylan's overall discography – as the second in his trilogy of overtly Christian records – and even less of a clue about its thematic content (it didn't have the album cover above, but instead a picture of Dylan playing live). That meant my response to it was fairly open-minded, and free of any prejudice associated with the album's lowly critical status, and I remember enjoying the gospel sound and the spirited playing of many tracks.
This is especially evident on the title song, Saved, with its great rock & roll riff, while Satisfied Mind and Covenant Woman feel like throwbacks to the folk ballads of Dylan's earlier 60s period. However, What Can I Do For You? leaves me feeling a bit flat musically, and drags on for far too long. That said, I really love the middle section of this record – Solid Rock, Pressing On and In The Garden – which form a run of three songs to match anything in Dylan's mid-70s output.
In fact, Dylan mentioned In The Garden, along with Brownsville Girl, as songs he felt didn't get the attention they deserved at the time, as part of the Q&A he did earlier this year to tie in with the release of Triplicate. Far less strident than many of the songs on his previous record, In The Garden explores the doubts that people still felt despite being faced with evidence of Jesus' divinity, and Dylan is asking those same questions of his modern audience. Musically, it is also a real achievement, building to a strong gospel climax. Pressing On also articulates Dylan's spiritual struggle.
Saved was recorded in just days, and this shows when comparing my early CD and vinyl copies with the 2013 remastered version now available to stream. Perhaps this was part of the reason for the album's highly critical reception – in fact, Saved marked the start of Dylan's relative commercial wilderness, for a period of almost two decades – but it deserves a reappraisal in my view, and is an improvement on Slow Train Coming. Not only does it have better songs than the previous record, but Dylan also seems to have lost that strange fundamentalist certainty of living in the End Times, based on a modern interpretation of Revelation, with Gog seen as Russia and Magog as Iran. That said, closing track Are You Ready? is an articulation of the evangelising that Dylan would perform at his shows during this time, inciting his audience to give up on unbelief and follow God.
Looking back now, Dylan's Christian phase could be seen as just another manifestation of his obsessive personality; when he gets interested in something, he throws himself all in. It's also worth remembering that he was approaching 40 at the time, and that reassessing one's beliefs is a common feature of a mid-life crisis. I like Saved both for its sound and for the way that it reintroduces just a tiny element of the moral ambiguity for which Dylan's songwriting is famed.
Album rating: B-
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