“I actually think it’s the best record he’s made.” Elvis Costello.

It’s a quarter of a century since the release of my first, and probably still favourite, Bob Dylan album, Time Out Of Mind.

I was 18 when it came out in 1997 and had just started university. I’d tried to get into Dylan’s music a couple of times in my teens; I understood his importance and influence as an artist and how he’d inspired other songwriters whose work I loved, but it hadn’t connected with me at all. One of my college teachers whose taste in music I trusted had made me a compilation tape of their favourite Dylan tracks but it just didn’t land with me.

I can’t recall why, then, I decided to buy Time Out Of Mind when it came out. Maybe it was the positive reviews or perhaps I was looking for an escape from the depressing, dying embers of the Britpop scene, Be Here Now and all that. I may simply have been flush after banking my student grant.

I knew within the first few seconds of Time Out Of Mind that this was my kind of album: those stabbed organ notes, followed by Bob’s otherworldly voice and that opening line: “I’m walking through streets that are dead”. I was in.

I loved Dylan’s vocals on Time Out Of Mind instantly: less of the old nasal whine and more of a guttural delivery, every syllable drenched in what sounds like several lifetimes of experience. His phrasing is fantastic – the way he occasionally hovers over a word for that extra split second before delivering it: “Sometimes the silence can feel like thunder. Sometimes I want to take to the road and… plunder.”

The narrative around the album was that this was an old man staring into the face of his own mortality following his recent health scare. Bob certainly seemed impossibly old to my teenage self, although with 40 now only visible in my rear view mirror, 56 doesn’t seem quite as ancient anymore.

Death undoubtedly stalks the album, as Dylan observes: “I know the mercy of God must be near”, “it’s not dark yet but it’s getting there” and “the party’s over and there’s less and less to say”. The latter comes from the shaggy dog story of Highlands, whose lyric is usually referenced for its comical exchange between the narrator and the long, white shiny-legged waitress in a Boston restaurant: humour and acceptance of one’s mortality in the same song.

There are highlights aplenty: the aforementioned Highlands, key track Not Dark Yet, opener Love Sick and – despite sounding like the music from the old British TV advert for Hamlet cigars – Standing in the Doorway. Bob’s voice is particularly great on Cold Irons Bound and Can’t Wait.

A couple of weaker tracks – Tryin’ To Get To Heaven and Make You Feel My Love – should probably have been swapped out for the wonderful and inexplicably-omitted Red River Shore and Mississippi, while ‘Till I Fell In Love With You might be one bluesy shuffle too many. I still dig those songs, though, and never skip them – they’re part of my Time Out Of Mind experience. As with the first albums I bought by my greatest heroes – Paul McCartney’s Flowers In The Dirt and Costello’s Mighty Like A Rose – my love for and emotional connection with the album overrides my objectivity. I’ll take the record just as Bob intended.

Time Out Of My Mind served as a gateway to the rest of Dylan’s catalogue. Older songs I’d previously dismissed suddenly made sense and I was on board to enjoy his subsequent releases in real time. So many of my favourite Dylan songs come from the last quarter of a century: Scarlet Town, Spirit On The Water, Beyond Here Lies Nothin’, Key West and Tin Angel the first batch off the top of my head. Had I not bought Time Out Of Mind in ’97, who knows if I’d have heard them otherwise.

Happy 25th birthday then, Time Out Of Mind. Here’s to the next quarter of a century, at the end of which, if God is on my side, I’ll be (gulp) older than Dylan was when he recorded it. If it’s not already dark by then, it’ll certainly be getting there.