How Rick Danko Managed to Make Goodbye So Uplifting

Bandmates and friends completed a long-awaited solo album 25 years ago this month.

You don’t often hear Rick Danko’s winking impishness on Times Like These, released 25 years ago this month. You don’t hear the happy-go-lucky scoundrel of his final years. At this point, and maybe it’s just because of what we now know about the LP, everything tends to be shot through with a devastating sadness.

Except the title track.

The previous December, Danko had died suddenly at just 55. But in the deepening well of emotion as this posthumous recording unfolded, there was still something left – and for that, we can be thankful. He could still bring you close in a moment of absorbing emotion, fragile and tender, even if there weren’t many more of these moments left.

At the time of his passing, Danko had started work anew on an album to follow up 1999’s Live on Breeze Hill. The project was ultimately finished with help from his 1990s-era cohorts in the Band and Aaron Hurwitz. Somehow, highlights arrived aplenty, but nowhere more than the Danko original that gave the LP its name.

Danko had been batting around “Times Like These” for some time, singing the track backstage, in hotels and at soundchecks. He’d originally begun writing the song back in the ’70s. It’s hard to hear, as he offers these gorgeous encouragements, just why this song went unreleased. Thankfully, it belatedly was.

“Times Like These” is the equal to anything he released as part of either of the Danko Fjeld Anderson projects or with the modern-era Band, save for “Book Faded Brown” – which returns in live form elsewhere on Times Like These.

A sparse accompaniment, powered along by a gloriously Fellini-esque accordion and the soft entreaties of backing singers Leslie Ritter and Marie Spinosa, only adds to the crepuscular atmosphere that envelops “Times Like These.” When the song ends, as surely it must, there’s the feeling of coming awake after a beautiful reverie.

Much of the rest of Times Like These is really odds and ends, including a leftover track (“Chain Gang”) from sessions for the Band’s High on the Hog and a couple of songs from Danko’s final concert on Dec. 6, 1999. Listening again, you’re suddenly brought back into this awful present without him.

Still, nothing quite matches “Times Like These.” How could it? In times like this one, that glowing title track seems to have a strange prophetic quality. It’s as if Rick Danko was already encouraging us in his absence.

Amazon bestselling rock-band biographer Nick DeRiso’s upcoming book is ‘Forever Young: How the Band and Bob Dylan Made the Only ’60s Music That Still Matters.’ Due later in 2025. www.nickderiso.com.