"Cold Irons Bound" is a Grammy Award-winning song written by Bob Dylan, recorded in January 1997 and released on September 30, 1997 as the eighth track on his album Time Out of Mind. The song was produced by Daniel Lanois. Background and composition Dylan was inspired to write the song in the studio after hearing drummer David Kemper, who had arrived early one day, playing an unusual beat. As Kemper explained in an interview with Uncut: The song is performed in the key of B-flat major. Critical reception Oliver Trager describes "Cold Irons Bound" as "biting" with "ricocheting guitar licks, rockabilly drums, distorted organ, and [a] voice floating in a blimp of its own echo", in which "one can still hear, to paraphrase "Visions of Johanna", the ghost of electricity howling from the bones of Dylan's face..." Greil Marcus of The San Francisco Examiner made note of the song's "whiplashed rhythm", while Mick Gold, in a retrospective piece for Rock's Backpages, highlighted the memorability of the track's "musique concrete bluesy clutter", saying "the musical noise is more memorable than the lyrics." AllMusic's Jim Esch said: "Thanks to Daniel Lanois's muddy, echo drenched production, 'Cold Irons Bound' sounds like it was mailed in from another time, decades ago from the midnight blue ether. Dylan's voice is at times overmatched by the thick sonic soup, but all the same, the feel is there, and the feel is gnarly, bluesy. Nasty guitars and drums clatter and shuffle overtop a bass riff while Dylan whips off acerbic couplets". Michael Gray also describes this song in detail: Spectrum Culture included the song on a list of "Bob Dylan's 20 Best Songs of the '90s". In an article accompanying the list, critic Kevin Korber argued that the song is more interesting for the music, and Lanois' atmospheric production, than for Dylan's lyrics: "'Cold Irons Bound' is the ur-example of what Daniel Lanois could do with Dylan, a collaboration that started back with Oh Mercy but arrived in full form on Time Out of Mind. In contrast to the clear, compressed sounds that Dylan began the decade with, 'Irons' is incredibly murky, an echo-laden blues jam that sounds completely disassociated from this plane of existence. Dylan’s voice, by this point weaker and thornier than it had been at his peak, could have been lost in the studio ether, but it instead sounds haunted, a spectral song from