Blood on the Tracks |
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Released: January 20, 1975 Charted: February 8, 1975 Peak: 12 US, 4 UK, 12 CN, 4 AU, 13 DF Sales (in millions): 3.0 US, 0.1 UK, 10.0 world (includes US and UK) Genre: folk rock |
Tracks:(Click for codes to charts.)
All songs written by Bob Dylan. Total Running Time: 51:42 Spotify PlaylistCheck out my Spotify playlist of all ten of these songs as covered by Ryan Adams, Joan Baez, Jeff Buckley, Neko Case, Shawn Colvin, Rodney Crowell & Emmylou Harris, the Indigo Girls, Freddie King, My Morning Jacket, and Jeff Tweedy.
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Rating:
 4.678 out of 5.00 (average of 21 ratings)
Quotable:“Dylan made albums more influential than this, but he never made one better.” – Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AllMusic.comAwards:(Click on award to learn more).
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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.” AMThe 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 AlbumBlood 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-25Dylan 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 RecordingsDylan 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 RecordingsThe 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.” TBDylan 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 SuccessBlood 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.” TBThat 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 SongsHere are thoughts on individual songs.“Tangled Up in Blue” 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 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” “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” “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” 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” 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” 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 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” “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” 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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First posted 1/17/2012; last updated 8/17/2024. |
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