About the Album:
“Blood on the Tracks is not just Bob Dylan’s greatest album, but one of the single greatest records in the history of modern music.” PM The album finds Dylan “retreating to the past, recording a largely quiet, acoustic-based album.” AM It follows an album and tour “where he repudiated his past with his greatest backing band” AM a – The Band – which “apparently re-ignited his creativity.” AZ “This is the sound of an artist returning to his strengths.” AM
The album is marked by a “luxuriant tangle of guitars, the gritty directness in Dylan’s voice and the magnificent confessional force of his writing.” 500 It “brought a new emotional depth to his legacy” UT as “the voice of a generation drops his barbed commentary to display some equally barbed vulnerability.” VB
The Divorce Album
Blood on the Tracks is popularly referred to as Dylan’s divorce album because it supposedly documents “the collapse of his marriage to Sara Lownds.” 500 Jakob Dylan, Bob and Sara’s son and the lead singer of the Wallflowers, supposedly said Blood on the Tracks was about his parents. However, it is only indirectly attributed to him. Journalist DeCurtis recalls it as a comment Jakob supposedly said to Andrew Slater, the Wallflowers’ manager. JC-25
Dylan himself bristles at the idea that the album is “autobiographical and thematizes the dilapidated state of his marriage” JC-10 even though the album “does channel a personally tumultuous and expansive year for him.” CQ In the liner notes for the 1985 Biograph set, he attacks the “stupid and misleading jerks” who think it is about him and his wife. JC-11
Nonetheless, the album’s “basic plotline – she’s gone, he’s over come with sadness – is inescapable.” TM It “gnaws away at the brutality of interpersonal grief and the anger, loss and vindictiveness that arises between two people who love each other but can’t keep growing together.” PM “This is an album alternately bitter, sorrowful, regretful, and peaceful, easily the closest he ever came to wearing his emotions on his sleeve.” AM This is “an eerie self-portrait of a man who’s been blindsided…and is gradually beginning to apprehend where, exactly, he stands.” TM
Dylan has also said he’s surprised that people like the album so much. “It’s hard for me to relate to that. I mean, you know, people enjoyed the type of pain.” JC-10 Entertainment Weekly counters that, saying “It’s harder to imagine anyone not getting swept up in this masterpiece of deeply emotional songwriting.” EW’12 Consequence.net’s Katie Moulton offers a similar sentiment, saying that, “It’s the album modern listeners reach for most readily, because it doesn’t sound like a souvenir from a failed counterculture or obscure outsider Americana — but it does sound like Dylan.” CQ
The New York Recordings
Dylan wrote fifteen “lyrically piercing, gingerly majestic folk-pop songs” 500 in the summer of 1974; half would end up on Blood on the Tracks. “He was so proud of them that he privately auditioned almost all of the album, from start to finish, for pals and peers including Mike Bloomfield, David Crosby and Graham Nash.” 500
“Driven by a back to the roots sentiment” JC-74 Dylan sought out John Hammond, who had signed the bard to Columbia and produced his first three albums. He wanted to record the album in his old studio on the corner of 52nd Street and 7th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. In 1967, however, Columbia sold the studio to A&R, the record company of Jack Arnold and Phil Ramone. However, because of Hammond’s influence – and the fact that Ramone had served as the recording engineer on Dylan & the Band’s live album Before The Flood – Dylan was able to use the studio. JC-75
Dylan actually booked studio time without knowing who would accompany him. TB He started out in September 1974 recording with members of the bluegrass band Deliverance. 500 However, he quickly regrouped with Buddy Cage on pedal-steel guitar, Tony Bruan on bass, and Paul Grffin on organ. TB
The Minnesota Recordings
The album was then set for a December 1974 release date. That plan was derailed when Dylan headed to Minnesota to visit his family. He played the album for his brother David who assessed it as a collection of “beautiful songs, but they sound quite the same, heard in succession.” JC-78 He also pointed out that “the lyrics were just a little too obviously autobiographical.” TB
Dylan canceled the release date and recut some of the songs over two days with local musicians, making them “tougher, more energized, more caustic, and closer to the spirit of classic Dylan from the mid 1960s.” TB In the rerecordings, Dylan “summons a raw, overtly wounded tone that magnifies the feeling behind the words.” TM
Five of the new versions ended up on Tracks – “Idiot Wind,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” “You’re a Big Girl Now,” and “If You See Her, Say Hello.” The final mix of the album combined the New York and Minneapolis tapes. 500
The Album’s Success
Blood on the Tracks followed “a string of so-so outings between 1970 and 1974 that didn’t move the needle much on his legacy.” PM His previous album, 1974’s Planet Waves, “had flashes of the old genius, but hard-line disciples of the one-time spokesman for a generation feared that their guru’s creative fire had been all but extinguished.” TB
That made Blood on the Tracks, Dylan’s fifteenth studio album, “a welcomed return to form for Dylan—an album that cemented him, likely for good, as the greatest songwriter ever. No musician produced a narrative as sharp and devastating before Blood on the Tracks came out, and no one has come close since.” PM
This was only his second chart-topper in the U.S. after 1974’s Planet Waves. This was also only his second album to reach double platinum status, after 1966’s Blonde on Blonde. According to BestSellingAlbums.org, this is the best selling studio album of Dylan’s entire career.
The Songs
Here are thoughts on individual songs.
“Tangled Up in Blue”
The album’s best-known song is Tangled Up in Blue, “one of Dylan’s greatest songs ever.” PM It “sets the tone for the album about a couple whose love collapses.” RV It is “an enduring five-and-a-half-minute epic that unfurls tales of searchers, intrigue, and tenderness over a brightly rolling acoustic current.” CQ He once introduced onstage “as taking him ten years to live and two years to write.” 500 “There is no song in his catalogue with which Dylan has scraped and tinkered so much.” JC-17 He was inspired to write the song “after having immersed himself in the music of Joni Mitchell’s Blue for a weekend.” JC-17
The song “poetically tells us that the storms of life leave their marks and that we are becoming a different person along the way.” JC-16 It also “gives sufficient hints to justify a biographical interpretation. Sara was not only a model but also Playboy bunny (‘She was workin’ in a topless place’) and indeed still married when they first met. In his early years Dylan sometimes plays in a joint on ‘Montague Street’ and he lives with a couple in the neighborhood, he is originally from Minnesota (‘the Great North Woods’) and recalls his ‘Girl from the North Country.’” JC-17
Dickey Betts, Jerry Garcia, and the Indigo Girls have covered the song.
“Simple Twist of Fate”
“The existentialist jewel Simple Twist of Fate” 500 “can be understood as the swan song of an extinct love, a description of the physical breaking point, the point where the lovers actually part.” JC-20 The song may be about “his first great love Suze Rotolo.” JC-21 He sings “I still believe she was my twin” and in his book Chronicles, Dylan says Suze “might have been his spiritual soul mate.” JC-21
“The music is gorgeous..The sprase use of the minor chord is masterful…Eveyrone else would, given the melancholic lyrics, play the entire song in minor. Song Maestro Dylan senses that he adds to the fascination when he plays in the major, briefly slipping to minor in every forth line – when the character feels alone, when he gets hit by the heat of the night, when he feels empty inside, when he is despairing if she would ever pick him again.” JC-22
Joan Baez, Concrete Blonde, Jerry Garcia, Diana Krall, and Jeff Tweedy have done covers.
“You’re a Big Girl Now”
“The song has a beautiful melody, the notes are in the right place to enhance the dramatic, melancholy lyrical content…[and the] performance is decisive.” JC-28 “The lyrics have a peculiar magic” JC-27 weaving a “story of a man who has fallen madly in love…however, it suddenly becomes clear…that the narrator has been dumped and that he last the ground under his feet.” JC-27
“In the sixties, Dylan succumbs to the age-old familiar connection of rain with heartbreak and related amorous misery.” JC-25 “The narrator in You’re a Big Girl Now is back in the rain.” JC-25 The listener is lead “involuntarily back to eight years earlier, to the I-figure from ‘Just Like a Woman,’ who is in the rain after yet another stranded love affair.” JC-25
“Idiot Wind”
“Idiot Wind allows Dylan to vent his rage, and he scorns his ex-wife as ‘an idiot, babe / It’s a wonder you still know how to breathe.’” RV It is “one of Dylan’s undisputed monuments,” JC-30 “one of the most nasty and indscrete songs in his oeuvre,” JC-36 “his greatest put-down song since ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’” 500 It is “a masterly, heart-breaking confessional song.” JC-32 “The mastery lies within the vulnerability under the rawness. The narrator is mean, unreasonable, and malicious, but does not succeed in becoming unsympathetic; we all hear the pain speaking, not the man himself. A corkscrew is twisted into his heart and…this hurt, heartbroken man damns his beloved.” JC-32
“The opening lines of the seventh verse are the most abrasive of the entire song. The narrator here exposes himself to such an extent that the listener gets the uncomfortable feeling of unwittingly reading someone else’s diary.” JC-34
“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”
“Despite the title the song is not about loss, farewell or pain. It does express bittersweet melancholy, but an enamored cheerfulness prevails. That focus is primarily due to the musical accompaniment…especially thanks to the tempo and the harmonica Dylan elevates the song to jittery joy. And secondly…the poet is in love.” JC-40
In 1974, Dylan had an affair with Ellen Bernstein, a 24-year-old Columbia Records employee. It isn’t hard to connect the song to her considering that he references Ashtabula – where Ellen was born – and Honolulu and San Francisco – both places where she later lived. JC-40
Miley Cyrus and Shawn Colvin are among the artists to cover the song.
“Meet Me in the Morning”
In “the flawless blues Meet Me in the Morning” AZ “Dylan interlaces the lyrical painting of man’s suffering with his characteristic poetry.” JC-47 “Dylan produces…sparkling antique poetry in a song text that is much more than a run-of-the-mill blues lamento.” JC-48
Regarding the musical accompaniment, Dylan again lifts the song “above a common blues.” JC-48 The band is led by Eric Weissberg, who provided the soundtrack – and especially the memorable song “Dueling Banjos” – to the 1972 movie Deliverance. The song also features Buddy Cage on steel guitar. He “plays lightly over the sung verses and then nails the searing break through the song’s closing stages.” JC-49
The Black Crowes, David Gray, and Freddie King have covered the song.
“Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”
This is an intricate story song from Dylan about “two attractive women and an inscrutable, mysterious stranger,”JC-51 which can be interpreted as being about Sara (or Suze), Joan Baez, and Dylan. “The plot looks classic enough; on the surface it is a weekday cowboy novel with all the clichés involved. A mysterious stranger, a bank robbery, there is poker, the local landowner has an extramarital affair with the beautiful show girl, a public hanging, a sloon, a judge…images and archetypes we know from every western.” JC-53
The Jack of Hearts “turns the head of danseuse Lily, with whom he apparently already shares an amorous past. She is the mistress of the local big shot Big Jim, who is not exactly charmed by Lily’s crush. That leads to the climax, which takes place in Lily’s dressing room. Big Jim kicks open the door and pulls his revolver, but is stabbed from behind, presumably by his wife Rosemary, whose knees also get weak over the Jack of Hearts. It all comfortably distracts from the work of Jack’s gang members, who are prising open the wall of the bank, two doors down. Rosemary is hung the next day, Jack is gone with the booty and the fair Lily is left behind, contemplating.” JC-53
There have even been two attempts to turn this “hectic epic” JC-58 into a script, but neither came to fruition. The fan-made video below reflects how visual the song is. One of the comments about the video is “This has always been a moving picture in my head. I imagine a whole movie building up to this scene.”
In 1975, Joan Baez completely reworked her song “Diamonds and Rust” after hearing Dylan’s “Jack of Hearts.” “Diamonds” “is pleasantly, mild-mocking, honestly poignant, melancholic and poetic, a song in which Baez looks back, without any bitterness, at her time with Dylan.” JC-51
“If You See Her, Say Hello”
“The narrator in the elegant, gentle song does not question guilt, but is filled with blameless regret.” JC-56 “The wrung-dry goodbye of If You See Her, Say Hello” 500 “is one of the triggers to qualify Blood on the Tracks as Dylan’s ‘Divorce Album.’” JC-57 The narrator “paints a much richer, multi-faceted…more moving portrait of the abandoned lover than the overwhelming majority of…sad farewell songs.” JC-58
The song is notable in that it “has no chorus, no refrain, no strict metre – it escapes Dylan’s normal conventions for song lyrics and differs from the other songs on the album. It is rather similar to classical poetry.” JC-58
“Shelter from the Storm”
There have been various interprations of “the marble, grand masterpiece Shelter from the Storm” JC-58 The song can be viewed as “a monologue of a returning Vietnam veteran or a Holocaust survivor.” JC-63 It can be seen as “the flection of a drug addict over his addiction” JC-63 and it can be interpreted as the “wresting of a husband whose wife eludes him.” JC-63 It can even be taken as an account of a dead soul “before the thone of God.” JC-63
“The one-eyed undertaker in ‘Shelter from the Storm’ is one of the much-discussed images from one of Dylan’s most beautiful songs…Many Dylan fans consider the song a personal favorite.” JC-62
“Buckets of Rain”
“The sweetly devastating Buckets of Rain” AZ is an “ambivalent, heart-breaking and intimate blues folk” JC-70 song. “It is a beautiful finale to a beautiful record…After these songs of lost love and despair, the master chooses a melancholic final piece, decorated with confusing, Dylanesque contradictions, with naïve frankness and inscrutable metaphors.” JC-70
Conclusion:
“Blood on the Tracks remains an intimate, revealing affair since these harsher takes let his anger surface the way his sadness does elsewhere. As such, it’s an affecting, unbearably poignant record, not because it’s a glimpse into his soul, but because the songs are remarkably clear-eyed and sentimental, lovely and melancholy at once. And, in a way, it’s best that he was backed with studio musicians here, since the professional, understated backing lets the songs and emotion stand at the forefront. Dylan made albums more influential than this, but he never made one better.” AM
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