Some critics have praised Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” as their best album. And with good reason. The album is a stark mix of personal angst, fantasy and poetry that bursts forth with an abundance of fabulous melodies. The album was not the best seller; “Greatest Hits,” “Greatest Hits – Vol. II” and “Desire” sold more, but as an artistic achievement, only “Highway 61 Revisited” was undeniably better.
Let’s go through the songs in order:
Tangled Up In Blue: This seven-verse labyrinthine epic is a road song/love song that has as many twists and turns as a slalom. Written in the summer of 1974 on a newly purchased farmhouse in Minnesota, it examines a fictional relationship that comes together, breaks up, gets back together much later, and finally breaks up a second time, still hoping for reconciliation. When he sings, “She was married when we met, she’ll be divorced soon,” this is an accurate description of his first meeting with his future wife, Sara Lownds. When they met, she was already married and the mother of a girl. Onstage, Dylan has occasionally introduced this song about the ups and downs of his subsequent marriage to Sara, telling the audience that it took him “10 years of living and 2 years of writing.” As part of their 1977 divorce settlement, Sara got half of the royalties from songs Dylan wrote while they were married… “Tangled up in blue” included.
While most of the references in the song are pure fantasy, some of them are quite real. There really is a “Montague Street” in an upscale section of Brooklyn that had a music venue called “Capulet” (remember Shakespeare’s Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet) that Dylan would frequent sometimes. The allusion to “an Italian poet of the fifteenth century” may sound ambiguous at first, but the explanation is that there was two recorded versions of this song: first in New York and then in Minnesota. The Minnesota version was the one used on the album. But in the earlier New York version the lyrics were originally “13th century,” a clear reference to the Italian poet Dante.
From the lines, “All the people we used to know are now an illusion to me,” we get the impression that the breakup of their relationship seemed surreal to him. The song ends with a frank confession: “We always felt the same, we just saw it from a different point of view, tangled up in blue.”
Despite his legendary career, Dylan never hit the charts as often as artists/bands with comparable influence, such as the Beatles, Elvis, and the Rolling Stones. “Tangled up in blue” was a happy exception, breaking into Billboard’s Top 40 in March 1975.
