Blood on the Tracks

One doesn't have to be a broken-hearted straight male (or even a Nobel Prize voter) to fall in love with Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, but it might help. Filled with open-ended and often gender-specific pronouns, the yous, hers, hes, shes, and theys remain unnamed on all but one of the 10 songs on the moody 1975 epic, each a glowing invitation for listeners to fill in the blanks with their own nearest available emotional devastations. Often referred to as Dylan’s “breakup album,” it’s likewise become just that for many listeners, both expressing and absorbing great aloneness. Dylan himself professed confusion about the album’s popularity. “It’s hard for me to relate to that,” he said the year Blood on the Tracks was released. “I mean, people enjoying that kind of pain.”

But as plenty have pointed out in the wake of Dylan’s Nobel for Literature, his music is about far more than just his lyrics, and Blood on the Tracks is a prime example of just what that more constitutes. Beyond the emotional wreckage, Blood on the Tracks might be Dylan’s most welcoming LP, its music projecting an undeniable warmth. The disc-opening “Tangled Up in Blue” uncorks the feels via an experimental narrative that fights conventional linearity, but the reasons to keep listening are contained in the first 11 seconds of forward motion before Dylan’s voice enters. Only after that do lyrics even matter, and (on Blood on the Tracks, anyway) he is pretty fantastic at both.

Blood on the Tracks is pleasing and complete enough to visit repeatedly, until the syllables become words, the words resolve into meanings, and all of it becomes internalized, a space accessible even without the presence of the album. Perhaps the least dated of Dylan’s recordings, there is a nakedness to everything. Untainted by the politics and cool of the ’60s or the gated drums and overdubbed productions of the ’80s, Blood on the Tracks hits with the same immediacy in the 21st century as it did in 1975.

Just as much as Pink Floyd or any other mid-’70s LP-minded artist, Dylan uses the studio to create and sustain a mood on Blood on the Tracks, and this mood is what survives. Drawing from two sets of sessions and at least three configurations of not-fully-identified musicians to capture a singular batch of songs, the album is a full package of writing, performance, and atmosphere. Withdrawing an early version of the album on the eve of release, musicians from sessions in New York disappeared into the credit of “Eric Weissberg and Deliverance,” and musicians recorded later in Minneapolis received no credit at all. Though he received no separate title on the album itself, it is also the first album on which Dylan himself served as sole producer, assembling musicians on his own, sometimes to confusing effect. While staying within the parameters of folk-rock, Dylan finds a rich array of approaches, moving between the vivid brightness of “Tangled Up in Blue” and “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” the soft-voiced late-night guitar/bass duets of “Shelter From the Storm” and “Buckets of Rain,” and the pained autumnal crispness of “Idiot Wind.”

“Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan” ran one of Columbia Records’ ’60s advertising campaigns, but by the early ’70s consumers were deluged with multiple generations of New Dylans, each expanding from territory that once belonged almost exclusively to Dylan, from Joni Mitchell to Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen to Patti Smith. After a few years in the wilderness, when Dylan recorded for David Geffen’s Asylum Records (and Columbia released Dylan, scraping up unissued sessions without his consent), Blood on the Tracks might be seen as Dylan’s own assertion that nobody wrote Dylan like Dylan, either. For fans at the time, it was a revelation, both a few notches less cryptic than his ’60s surrealism, but no less mystical, folding in techniques of his old finger-pointin’ (“Idiot Wind”), blues-strummin’ (“Meet Me in the Morning”), vision-havin’ (“Shelter From the Storm”), and story-tellin’ (“Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts”) self, all while tapping into powerful new realms of vulnerability.

As a writer, Dylan had been through about three lightly overlapping phases over the previous 15 years—young and Woody (1960-1963), young and visionary (1964-1968), and young and happy (1969-1973), and Blood on the Tracks built on them while promising something more. Officially retired and raising children during the early ’70s, Dylan had deliberately downshifted into a less complex lyric style beginning with 1969’s Nashville Skyline, in part hoping to shake some of the obsessive global audience he’d attracted. New Morning and other country-pop sessions from the period found Dylan playing with some of the brighter textures he would employ on Blood on the Tracks, but his reluctance to write in the symbolism-laden voice of his earliest years soon resulted in a period when he “more or less had amnesia,” as he later told an interviewer. Returning to active songwriting in 1973 and the road in 1974 with the Band for Planet Waves, many of his latest songs seemed to lack the all-seeing perspective of his earlier work.

Dylan would say Blood on the Tracks was influenced by lecture classes he took with painter Norman Raeben in New York in early 1974. “You’ve got yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room,” he said of the new lyric writing approach that resulted. Heard most vividly in the long-arc narratives of “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Simple Twist of Fate,” verses and lines present images like shuffled postcards connected by what Dylan referred to as a “code.” It is here that thinking of Blood on the Tracks as a “breakup album” becomes reductive, missing out on much of what the collection of songs has to offer, the “breakup” as much a concept as the bandshell concert loosely framing Sgt. Pepper’s. Just as much as relationships are about more than their breakups, breakup albums are about more than their relationships.

Though the disintegration of Dylan’s marriage might easily be spotted in nearly every song on the album, there are also meditations on the ineffable passage of time (“Tangled Up in Blue”), a transitory love affair in the present tense (“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”) and media jackyldom and other bummers (“Idiot Wind”). For that matter, a full third of the LP’s second side is concerned with “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts,” a nine-minute 16-verse ballad that bucks the album’s signature themes of time regained, implacable loves, and unnamed names. Though remaining convincingly jaunty throughout with a light melody that catches the details in forensic clarity, its drawn-out story is a chore to decipher. Unlike the ambient emotional narratives of the rest of the album, the linear ballad requires a full and present attention, a reminder of one of the ways that music consumption is different than reading. Reportedly once considered for a film adaptation, the screen may’ve suited its stage-directed characters better than folk-rock. Further separating it from the rest, the blood spilled on this particular track doesn’t seem to be Dylan’s own, detracting from the album’s bigger picture and only underscoring the unifying power of the other nine songs.

Drawing on a range of songwriting tricks (including an open “E” tuning that assures that very few will play Dylan like Dylan, either), Blood on the Tracks emphasizes a feeling of raw expression. Singing live in the studio (with the exception of the overdubbed “Meet Me in the Morning”), Dylan placed his usual focus on capturing in-the-moment performances. And though his reputation for studio and onstage spontaneity is well-deserved, Blood on the Tracks also presents songs that he had spent almost all of 1974 writing and reworking. Personal, perhaps, the songs easily transcend their would-be biographies. If Dylan’s attitudes towards his partners sometimes stand out as patronizing—“You’re a Big Girl Now” acting as an equally infantilizing bookend to 1966’s “Just Like a Woman”—they reveal more about the nature of hurt than anything useful about the songwriter.

One glimpse into the making of the album comes through the version that Dylan very nearly released, scrapping it at the last moment, after jackets and test pressings had already been made. Playing an advance copy at a family gathering in Minnesota in over the holidays, Dylan—at the behest of his brother—decided he wanted a brighter sound, less of a downer. Flexing his superstar muscle and anticipating Neil Young, Kanye West, and others, he had the album recalled, pulling together a band of local folkies in the days after Christmas 1974 to rerecord half of the songs. The New York acetate (most recently offered in 2015 for $12,000) is all late night atmospherics, mostly just Dylan and bassist Tony Brown, the sound of the former’s coat-buttons brushing against his guitar strings. Though tracks have come out via various box sets, bootlegs of the New York sessions—sourced warmly from the acetate—are every bit as magical as the final product, a classic all its own, minus a clunkier “Lily, Rosemary, the Jack of Hearts.”

In Minneapolis, Dylan brightened up the sound (changing keys on “Tangled Up in Blue,” striking a lighter keynote) and toned down some of the crueler lyrics (especially on “If You See Her, Say Hello”). If atmosphere was lost (and it was, especially without the pedal steel-drenched “You’re A Big Girl Now”), then accessibility was gained. Charting at #1 on its January 1975 release, Blood on the Tracks is arguably the last Dylan album on which a majority of the songs became standards of their own, part of the invisible canon shared at coffee houses, college campuses, or anywhere bright-eyed young pickers might congregate. In that way, it is also maybe Dylan’s last album of originals to qualify as “folk music” in both senses of the phrase: the popular genre defined by the presence of idioms and acoustic instruments, but also the great shared body of songs with lives and language that exist apart from their studio recordings and original performers. With the Byrds and many others achieving their own hits with his tunes and Dylan himself often circulating unrecorded work via folk music zines and songwriting demos, this had long been the expected fate of Dylan's songs.

Imagining Dylan as a simple songwriter, the template of Blood on the Tracks—sad boy with an acoustic guitar and a handful of chords—might seem basic, until one tries to replicate anything about it, or even just strum the songs at home. Blood on the Tracks lives alone in Dylan’s catalog, that open “E” tuning (which Dylan refused to explain to his musicians) often preventing the songs from sounding exactly right in the hands of others. It lives on in its own peculiar way. Dylan has seemed to keep “Tangled Up In Blue” in particular to himself, rewriting the song several times, both casually (playing fast and loose with the pronouns), and more formally, including a near-total rework released on 1984’s Real Live. One of the few older songs Dylan has performed consistently in recent years, even newer verses have emerged over the past half-decade. Nobody covers Dylan like Dylan either, apparently.

Though the albums on either side of Blood on the Tracks both made it to #1 and contained hints of the same songwriting territory, via Planet Waves’ “Going, Going, Gone” and *Desire’*s “Sara,” especially, they were only just hints. Some of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks persona remained visible via the two legs of the Rolling Thunder Revue, but the original open tuning never returned, and Dylan would soon bury his vulnerability, too. The surrealism would resurface in full force for 1978’s Street-Legal, but the musical appeal didn’t. It took another few decades for Dylan even to return to the warm string-band sound of Blood on the Tracks, coming closest on his two 21st century albums of standards, Shadows in the Night and Fallen Angels. For a restless musician, it was a combination of factors that only came together once, locking together to transmit themselves through the years.

Even roughly 40 years later, Blood on the Tracks broadcasts hurt and longing so boldly it has become a stand-in, the type of shorthand a song licensor would deploy at the push of a button if it wasn’t so expensive and maybe too predictable. It manages a balance of old pain resolved and wounds so fresh they seem as if they might never heal, brutal personal assessment and doubt, unnecessary cruelties and real-time self-flagellation. While Blood on the Tracks can be a constant companion to listeners during periods of initial discovery, it (and Dylan’s whole catalog) has also become something to be lived with over a long period and put away for special occasions. Functioning like a literal album, the density of the passed time and pressed memories in “Tangled Up in Blue” grow richer with each passing year. As with the narratives of the songs themselves, Blood on the Tracks continues to absorb yesterday, today, and tomorrow, promising it can sustain new listeners as much as new meanings, should it ever have to be called back into service.