"What I feel for Dylan now and did not feel before is empathy. His music stands and it will survive. Because it embodied our feelings, we wanted him to embody them, too. He had his own feelings. He did not want to embody ours. We found it hard to forgive him for that.” - Roger Ebert, 2005
Bob Dylan has never known a moment of peace, a moment where he was allowed to speak for himself and not the millions of others who peer in his windows and wait with baited breath on every word. He was preaching scripture to the masses even when he was singing about weed, sex, drugs, fictional men of his dreams, he was never speaking in metaphors of his own, he was speaking in the metaphors of the public's consciousness. Dylan was a character, one of Robert Zimmerman’s imagination first, that was suddenly public domain in a matter of years. While other stars yearned for the spotlight focused unflinchingly upon Dylan, it was almost like a target on the back of the man himself. He was trapped under the stage lights on and off the clock, a clock that seemed to stand still as his youth ticked slowly away. Each move was analyzed, seen as the blueprint each was to follow or an act of unimaginable sin that proved the corruption of the world, different in the eyes of each beholder.
Bob Dylan wasn’t real. Suddenly, Robert Zimmerman also wasn’t.
When Bob Dylan married Sara Lownds in 1965, it was a shock to those who knew and a secret to the world. Even worse, when the marriage deteriorated Dylan was stuck between letting himself be a person or letting his work be a space for everyone to apply their own lives to. What resulted was arguably the most and least personal Bob Dylan would ever be, laying everything out to the world in a maze and mess of his emotions with Blood on the Tracks. Each vignette of the deteriorating relationship is masked in a thousand separate stories and anecdotes, the only thing to be sure of at the end is the fact that Dylan had a broken heart. Dylan would say on many occasions that the album has nothing to do with him, that it was inspired by stories he’d read or saying plainly that he didn’t write confessionally. His son, fellow musician Jakob Dylan described the album much simpler: “When I'm listening to Blood On The Tracks, that's about my parents,” even later saying that the songs are “my parents talking.” While Dylan may hold true to the fact Blood on the Tracks is not rooted in his own life, it’s legacy did the exact thing he ran so far from, taking on a life of it's own as one of the most revered and replicated pieces of heartbreak media ever thrust upon the popular culture. Typical for the man trying to spell out his exact issues with that.
Blood on the Tracks began its life in 1974, following Dylan’s tour with The Band, a comeback of sorts for both after a period of self-imposed isolation from the road. Guitarist Robbie Robertson of The Band described this trek with Dylan, saying in his book Testimony "We fought a good battle in '66, but we won the war in '74." While being a triumphant return to the road and public-ish life, the tour happened to end on a sour personal note for Dylan, as he started an affair with Ellen Bernstein, one that started the very long end of his broken relationship with Sara. Dylan had begun to take art classes around the time of the affair, crediting his art teacher Norman Raeben with his new outlook on life, beginning to write some of Blood during this time.
"Raeben taught me how to see ... in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt ... When I started doing it, the first album I made was Blood on the Tracks. Everybody agrees that it was pretty different, and what's different about it is there's a code in the lyrics, and also there's no sense of time." - Bob Dylan, 2011
This code is one that has become replicated throughout music as the standard of how to communicate the confusing nature of heartbreak. Dylan pulls from his own catalog, poets, films, the blues, etc. Journalist Ellen Willis would call the writing on the album “formidable ecclesiam”, starkly different from what Dylan had released before but still unmistakable as his. It plays with time, genre, point of view, and art as whole. It's a masterclass in writing from Dylan, something so fasinatingly personal yet devoted of anything that cements it as fact.
Blood on the Tracks opens with what could be argued as the finest opening track of all time, a song that transcends music or Dylan in terms of the importance of the writing displayed: Tangled Up In Blue. The song follows a story yet typically finds itself vacating the common ways of storytelling, it sets up the listener for the rest of the album. The Telegraph wrote of the song in 2013 saying, "The most dazzling lyric ever written, an abstract narrative of relationships told in an amorphous blend of first and third person, rolling past, present and future together, spilling out in tripping cadences and audacious internal rhymes, ripe with sharply turned images and observations and filled with a painfully desperate longing." This combination of past, future, and present is perfectly exemplified in the opening verse, Early one morning the sun was shining, I was laying in bed / Wondering if she’d changed at all, if her hair was still red / Her folks they said our lives together were going to be rough / They did like Mama’s homemade dress, Papa’s bankbook wasn't big enough. The first line is written and sung in the present, the narrator laying in bed wondering about this women we don’t know his connection, or lack thereof, with, before switching to the past instantly, thinking of how her parents never did approve of him for one reason or another, the line before basking on the future her parents had promised in the past, and how he was stuck dealing with this in the present. It’s not simple, it introduces the riddles that will mark the rest of the writing throughout the album, and showcases how Dylan used what he was learning from Raeben to play with time in his work. The entirety of this album plays with time, nondescript of anything but certain emotions that peak through the cleverly concealed stories Dylan was spinning. The title itself, Tangled Up In Blue, is just as confusing as the story being told; ‘tangled up in blue’ wasn’t a turn of phrase Dylan repurposed into a song title, it was how he thought to describe his own work after being impacted by Joni Mithcell’s 1971 masterpiece Blue. He reflected on this to New Musical Express in 1978 saying, “Joni Mitchell had an album out called Blue. And it affected me. I couldn't get it out of my head. It just stayed in my head. When I wrote that song [Tangled Up in Blue], I wondered, "What's that mean?" And then I figured that it was just there, and I guess that's what happened.” He expanded on this in 2018, saying the color blue seemed to be everywhere, “I felt like I was being swamped in it, or tangled up in it, to be more precise.”
Dylan writes the song with very broad brushstrokes, ideas so sprawling and emotions so universal the song seems to speak to anyone regardless of how based in reality any of it really is. Verse two sheds a bit more light on the woman causing this heartache, filling in loose details of how the narrator got to the point of this lovesick pause: She was marred when we first met, soon to be divorced / Help her out of a jam, I guess, but I used a little too much force describes the doomed nature that plagued the romance upon their first meeting, she was taken and he was willing to risk it, something that eventually split them. We drove the car as far as we could, abandoned it out west / Split up on a dark sad night both agreeing it was best, the drive could be a stand-in for pushing the affair as far is it could go before abandoning the idea in a shallow grave, ending the verse with She turned around to look at me as I was walking away / I heard her say over my shoulder ‘We’ll meet again someday on the avenue’, tangled up in blue. What’s interesting is Dylan writes of only himself walking away, not them parting two different directions, with her promise of meeting again under different, better circumstances only making him revert further into his melancholy. Many lyrics on Blood on the Tracks follow this idea of lovers torn apart by these other worldly circumstances, where even if there’s a promise of resolution or love to still be shared, the narrator turns away from solution and accepts the pain of the heartbreak over the pain of fixing something he deems too broken to repair. The next verse follows the narrator down to New Orleans where he finds a job on a boat, But all the while I was alone, the past was close behind / I seen a lot of women but she never escaped my mind, and I just grew tangled up in blue. There is a certain star-crossed lovers storyline that these lines truly instate into the story at hand, but what is so fascinating about Dylan’s take on the trope is how he only tells one side. She may have moved on, never felt the affair this deeply, or even forgot about him, but he still hangs on to her promise everywhere he goes. It’s unique in that sense, taking a trope that is so overdone and twisting it into such a story that doesn’t allow room for it to become overdone. Dylan’s use of time through the song ties the story in knots as it goes on, also doing this with the pronouns he uses. This becomes much more prevalent on later songs within the album, but on this track Dylan sees himself going from first person to third with near all character, continuously taking things out of the story, making it all the more confusing each time the audience would seem to settle on an understanding of his story. For example, in the next verse, after talking about his new job, he writes She was working in a topless place, never telling if she is the woman from earlier. He details his encounter with this woman as if she’s a completely foreign character, yet
undercuts that line of thinking with She was
standing there in the back of my chair, said to me ‘Don’t I know your name?’ / I muttered something underneath my breath, she studied the lines of my face. There’s a certain familiarity within these lines, how he sees her in a halo-like beacon of light while she seems to have a fleeting recollection of him, leading the listener to believe that she may be the one. This is once more rocked by the last lines, I must admit I felt a little uneasy when she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe, tangled up in blue. “Tie the laces of my shoe” can be read as a metaphor for sex, him going to a topless bar while still thinking of the woman from all those years and letting his loneliness be quelled by one night he can’t fully enjoy without thinking of someone else. Here he also writes of his feeling of blue in a way that cements his connection to Mitchell’s use, how blue was more than just sadness, but was the sort of sick, uneasy feeling that comes when grappling with issues bigger than oneself, even his job on the boat leads to this: a job marked by uneasy waters as he treads across the same emotional field. The fifth verse utilizes many common literary devices to make the work as universal as possible while still letting it remain specific to the story at hand, She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me, written by an Italian poet from the thirteenth century showcases this beautifully, whereas Dylan most likely had a very specific collection in mind, he lets the work keep this open-ended feeling by not specifying what exactly he’s speaking about. He follows this up with And every one of those words rang true and glowed like burning coal like it was written in my soul from me to you, a metaphor of feelings that lets the listener know how strong they are without spelling it out. Dylan’s next verse becomes even further detached from the rest of the narrative, as he begins to speak about slave trades and stops using first person words almost completely, only interjecting I became withdrawn, the only thing I knew how to do was keep on keeping on like a bird who flew, tangled up in blue. He repeats his words, something that solidifies his position as someone unable to stay when the going gets tough, only retreat further into his own, weird world. The last verse the narrator optimistically looks towards the future,
So now I’m goin’ back again
I got to get to her somehow
All the people we used to know
They’re an illusion to me now
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenters’ wives
Don’t know how it all got started
I don’t know what they’re doin’ with their lives
But me, I’m still on the road
Headin’ for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view
Tangled up in blue
This verse adds much context to what happened the rest of the songs, how as the narrator goes back and forth, taking things in and out of context he finds himself still stuck on this woman. All these stories of his life culminate in this understanding that someday along the avenue could be that very day, the line All the people we used to know are an illusion to me now speaks volumes within this, as each person he described so strongly mirrored himself and his star-crossed lover. It’s written in a way that showcases the narrator felt the same fleeting attachment to each short story as they went by that the listener did, never really understanding their context within his life. The song ends with an upbeat instrumental break, one that mirrors this newfound direction he feels himself going, even if he just admitted that their love could easily be being misread, that each saw the other as a form of sadness in different respects.
"She looked at him and he felt a spark
Tingle to his bones
'Twas then he felt alone
And wished that he'd gone straight
And watched out for a simple twist of fate"
Dylan writes Simple Twist of Fate how he wrote the entirety of Blood on the Tracks: masking first person story within third person detail. He switches between third person pronouns and self-referential ones with ease, the line A little confused, I remember well highlights a use of this well. He speaks to an unnamed woman, assumed to be a prostitute as someone with so much kindness she seems to become a saint in hooker's clothing. She dropped a coin into the cup of the blind man by the gate, is a small detail of this woman’s perceived kindness that affects the narrator in such stark ways, him comparing himself to a blind man whose invisible ailments are being quelled by the generosity and pity of this woman. It calls upon Amazing Grace, I was lost but now I am found, I was blind but now can see. After their encounter, a presumed night in a hotel, the narrator describes his loneliness in a monumental sense, Empty in a way he could not relate. Dylan describes the anxiety of the character in riddles, He hears the ticking of the clocks / And walks along with a parrot that talks. The clocks he hears a possible stand in for his fear is life is moving too fast past him without him understanding how he’s meant to live, or could be a
stand in to describe the heart beating within him, fast and consistent as he grapples with the idea he loves someone who he knows it’s not possible to love. The image he paints evokes the idea of the Tin Man at the end of The Wizard of Oz, his heart a clock that’s gifted to him by a grifter whose only job is to lie to make others feel complete. The parrot is the lone companion, a stand in for the loud, repetitive voice in his head that amplifies the anxious thoughts being alone leaves him with. As the narrator walks around in his anxious and frantic state, he "hunts her down by the waterfront docks, where all the sailors all come in." This opens the story once more to the idea of being about a prostitute, invoking the story of Liverpudlian folktale, Maggie Mae, a woman who would steal sailors away. The story would be echoed again in Elton John's Sweet Painted Lady, and even later within the Paul McCartney penned Mine For Me, each song is pointed nautical while discussing women in the line of work. Dylan then writes Maybe she'll pick him out again, how long must he wait? It shows how their exchange, at the end of the day, was always transactional. He has to be picked again because there was never love. and he has to hunt her down where he knows other men will be because he understands that his simple twist of fate was only in his mind. Going back to first person, Dylan croons, People tell me it's a sin, to know and feel too much within The line breaks the fourth wall slightly, alluding to the idea that passion and hope that could lead to the story above would be textbook sins, though he can only see how they are representative of his need for love and compassion. I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring most likely about Sara. Jakob stated once that his parents couldn't work out as husband and wife but were perfectly fine as mom and dad, their twin flames still ignited just not as they hoped they would be. She was born in spring, but I was born too late is a line that's loaded with double entendres. Spring could be meant as a literal, a simple acknowledgement that two people born in such different times can't get on a similar page. Most honestly, it attributes itself to being someone full of growth in life, spring is often a time of change and hope towards a future. Dylan's use of "I was born too late" places him outside of the spring, unable to grow in the ways needed or be a hope that would be wanted. It places the issues up in the air, attributing them to unchangeable things that were set in stone long before they ever met. He ends the song with Blame it on a simple twist of fate, once more alleviating a person from the blame and more so the funny tricks of time.
You’re A Big Girl Now often foils the young lovers on Dylan’s 1966 song Just Like A Woman.
The song opens with the lines Our conversation was short and sweet / It nearly swept me off-a my feet / And I'm back in the rain, oh, oh / And you are on dry land / You made it there somehow / You're a big girl now. There's lines in Just Like A Woman that mirror these, No one feels any pain, tonight as I stand in the rain / Everybody knows, that baby's got new clothes / But lately I've seen her ribbons and her bows have fallen from her curls / She aches just like a woman, but she breaks just like a little girl. The woman, if taken as a continuation, is now on dry land, pushing the narrator back into the rain where there is perceived to be no pain. While once she was viewed as a woman that was still stuck with her childish fears and dreams, Dylan christens her as a big girl now, someone who can deal with the issues he’s barred from assisting with alone. Bird on the horizon, sitting on the fence / He's singing his song for me at his own expense. and I'm just like that bird / Singing just for you, I hope that you can hear me singing through these tears draws upon this heartbreak of being unwanted and almost unneeded, Dylan compares himself to the bird on the fence, a delightful surprise who is appreciated when there but never something to be waited for with baited breath. The bird's song is unable to be understood by human ears, beautiful yet nonsensical, just as Dylan's song would be through his tears. He's there but not heard, respected but not understood, wanted but not needed. Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast / Oh, what a shame all we shared can't last reminds of Ain't it clear? I just can't fit. The next line is a plea for change, it fits just in with the tragedy of the narrator realizing there is nowhere to fit in a world tailor-made for this woman and not for him. Love is so simple, to quote a phrase / You've known it all the time, I'm learning it these days / Oh, I know where I can find you, oh, oh In somebody's room / It's a price I have to pay, you're a big girl all the way goes to When we meet again, introduced as friends, please don't let on that you knew me when I was hungry and it was your world. The world of Dylan’s work seems to understand that she knew what he always had to learn, that while he deemed himself mature and the woman childish, yet he learned it was him that had to learn the ways of the world. A change in the weather is known to be extreme marks the change from the beginning once more, about being stranded in the rain while the other stands from dry land, it alludes to how in Just Like A
Woman Dylan went from explaining that
there was no pain within in the rain until suddenly It was raining from the first, and I was dying there of thirst - lines that run together as another example of Dylan’s need to learn what he perceived he already knew. But what's the sense in changing horses in midstream? The phrase is often prefixed by the word "don't", and it's used to explain why people should not change allyship of a person, system, or idea in a crucial or difficult time. Dylan, using the phrase in a song that is marking the change in someone, asks what's the reasoning of changing these horses? While he sees the issues as well, he has a hard time figuring out the conclusion that now is when to jump ship when things are at their most hostile, why not have done it when they could part in an even better spot? While the narrator speaks to learn of his own issues, he still reverts back to the childish blaming that has afflicted him the whole song, once more elevating his own blame despite acknowledging his own faults. I'm going out of my mind with a pain that stops and starts like a corkscrew in my heart, ever since we've been apart. There's an admission of insanity bred by pain here, very similar to how he had done on Just Like a Woman; In the lines immediately following "dying there of thirst", Dylan penned So I came in here / And your long-time cure hurts / But what's worse is this pain in here, I can't stay in here. There's so much pain felt that Dylan likens it to his heart being not only pierced, but pierced by an object that had to be slowly maneuvered in and slowly extracted out. While before the long time curse had hurt, now it was something done on purpose in some ways, the pain leaving him within not only pain of the heart but pain of the mind. How the pain was no longer made by a childish nativity of the world and feelings, but by a girl who knew exactly what her actions would do. A big girl who he could no longer vigorously defend, or better yet - one that couldn't defend him.
"Listen to “Idiot Wind.” It is a hard, cold-blooded poem about the survivor’s anger, as personal as anything ever committed to a record. And yet is can also stand as the anthem for all who feel invaded, handled, bottled, packaged; all who spent themselves in combat with the plague; all who ever walked into the knives of humiliation or hatred. The idiot wind trivialized lives into gossip, celebrated fad and fashion, and glorified the dismal glitter of celebrity. Its products live on the covers of magazines, in all of television, if the poisoned air and dead grey lakes. But most of all, it blows through the human heart. Dylan knows that such a wind is the deadliest enemy of art. And when the artists die, we all die with them." - Peter Hamill (x)
Idiot Wind tackles Dylan the public persona, and then Robert Zimmerman himself. This was at a time when Dylan was at his furthest from the public, basically a character that was mocked up and found stories as opposed to a real life public figure with thoughts, feelings, and motivations. The first lines represents this beautifully, Someone's got it in for me, they're planting stories in the press / Whoever it is, I wish they'd cut it out / But when they will I can only guess they will say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy / She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me / I can't help it if I'm lucky. The verse highlights just about everything wrong with the treatment and expectations of Dylan at this time, how even as he made a concerted effort to protect his privacy and stay a family man and artist, he was still pinned up as someone who could have an outlandish story told about him as he was so easy to mold into whatever the public needed of him, the less he said the more the stories grew. People see me all the time and they just can't remember how to act / Their minds are filled with big ideas, images, and distorted facts. Dylan as a figure had always been just as alluring as he was divisive. For everything he was, there were ten ideas of what he wasn't. Roger Ebert talked of the media's treatment of him like he was a prop as one of the reasons no one should be surprised he was so often absent from the public eye. David Bowie wrote the song Song For Bob Dylan in 1971, which tackled the idea of Dylan v. the public v. neon Gods. He asked Zimmerman to tell his good friend Dylan that his work meant so much because You sat behind a million pairs of eyes and told them how they saw. He would go on to write that the people wanted him because they'd rather be scared "together than alone" - how Dylan transcended Zimmerman to become "every nations refugee". The song talks of this looming evil that only Dylan and his words could defeat, that he was the only person on Earth that could help people calm down with his words, like he was nothing but a prophet of the people. The song is outlandish, it highlights the insanity the public was putting Dylan through, doing this particularly well by differentiating Dylan the artist and Zimmerman the person. Paul Simon wrote in early 1963, as Dylan was coming up, that people "bowed and prayed to the neon God they made", how the words of the prophets were once put in leather-bound books yet could now be found on "tentamen halls and subway walls." Dylan was the people's false God, though he never marketed himself that way, the people wanted that from him. He barely played into it, fascinatingly enough. Even you, yesterday, you had to ask me where it was at / I couldn't believe after all these years you didn't know me better than that. This part brings the song back into the larger context of the album, how he was suddenly a stranger to the one person he needed to see as the real person amongst a sea of insanity. Idiot wind, blowing every time you open your mouth / You're an idiot, babe / It's a wonder you even know how to breathe. The title comes from a line from the Talmud, “No one commits a sin unless the wind of idiocy enters into him.” The song was as bitter as a man in Dylan's life could be. Alone, scared, and suddenly without a person of refuge who knew he was just human, unable to assimilate with the rest of the world because they expected too much of him. I ran into the fortune-teller who said ; "Beware of lighting that might strike" / I haven't known peace and quiet in so long, I can't remember what it's like This part of the verse places the listener right along with the man, how hopeless he feels that even a fortune teller seems to blanket his worries with a promise of the uncertainty. It's followed up by him comparing himself to Jesus Christ, "a lone soldier on the cross," which is far from the first time he was compared to Christ. Don McLean referred to Dylan using biblical imagery in American Pie, stating that when he became his generation's cultural figure, he stole Elvis Presley's thorny crown, how now he had to answer for every sin committed in his name despite never having committed them himself. Dylan casts himself upon the cross in his dilemma within his life, saying how even if everyone wanted to nail him thereafter he didn't succumb to the blood pouring into his eyes from the crown, In the final end he won the war after losing every battle. The next verse sees Dylan lose his loose grasp to sanity slightly, talking of how one day those who make him feel like this will "be in the ditch / Flies buzzing around your eyes, blood on your saddle." It leads right back into the biting chorus. It was gravity which pulled us down / And destiny which broke us apart - very similar to the line of "born in spring, born too late", Dylan speaks of the failures to the out of this world reasonings. How he and Sara may have loved one another, but that was bound to become something fractured like most other things in his life, destiny as he calls it here. He tells her that she "tamed the lion in my cage" but how that “wasn't enough to change my heart." Sara and Dylan had married in 1965, just as his star was starting to peak, due to her falling pregnant with his child. The marriage was kept secret, Dylan's friends said he wouldn't even tell them until long after it had happened, almost alluding to the fact that marriage may have only come from guilt. How he loved her, but their marriage was due to circumstance of her becoming pregnant
after having left her husband for him. Sara
was a largely safe space for Dylan, someone who was private and allowed him to have a space where that could be him too, highlighting further how their disillusion becomes all the harder on him. He lost his normalcy, he lost the one thing that stopped him from being Bob Dylan. He goes on to invoke the image of a Confusion Wheel, where he speaks of everything becoming twisted and skewed from what they had known before: What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good / You’ll find out when you reach the top, you’re on the bottom.' [..]"I can’t remember your face anymore / Your mouth has changed, your eyes don’t look into mine. or Dylan becomes detached at this point in the song, how once his anger towards the woman could be read as a build up frustration across his life, it suddenly becomes something specific to her, how she had changed while he had once been the one expected to become a whole separate person. The priest wore black on the seventh day And sat stone-faced while the building burned / I waited for you on the running boards, near the cypress trees, while the springtime turned slowly into Autumn. In another call back, Dylan once more equates Sara to the spring, how he was nothing more than the changing leaves while she was the rebirth of beauty. Note how in his line the summer is negated, how the seasons of change are suddenly back and back and bleed into one another, no time for something to be consistent. The priest in all black could represent Bob Dylan and the building his marriage, how the courtship between Zimmerman and Sara burned as Dylan sat at the scene of the crime, unflinching and to be unblamed. I can't feel you anymore / I can't even touch the books you've read / Every time I crawl past your door, I been wishin' I was somebody else instead [..] I followed you beneath the stars / Hounded by your memory and all your ragin' glory / I been double-crossed now, for the very last time / And now I'm finally free / I kissed goodbye to the howling beast, on the border line which separates you from me Dylan's refusal to put Sara at blame, even as he desperately tries is a fascinating flaw to the character he tried so hard to embody within the lines of Idiot Wind. While he feels marred by her betrayal and vitriol seeped into his memories of her, he still can't let her become the villain of their story. It's still fate, destiny, the seasons, now a howling beast. It may come across as a holier than thou conclusion to the epic he released, but lest not forget he had already referred to himself as Jesus Christ, and would do so again before the story ended, closing the final verse with: You'll never know the hurt I suffered nor the pain I rise above / And I'll never know the same about you, your holiness or your kind of love / And it makes me feel so sorry. Dylan casts himself as a person who was shouldered an unthinkable amount of pain in his closing remarks, yet at the same time very simply ignores how Sara was to always be competing with Bob Dylan for Zimmerman's attention. How Norman Osborne crawled across the floor to Green Goblin mask beckoning him is how Dylan was in the eyes of the Zimmermans. Idiot wind blowing through the buttons of our coats / Blowing through the letters that we wrote / Idiot wind blowing through the dust upon our shelves / We're idiots, babe -It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves.
You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go is said to be written about Ellen Bernstein, details towards places she had lived over the years scattered across the song. The song mentions the flower Queen Anne's lace, Bernstein saying she most likely introduced to
Dylan on a walk around her Minnesota farm, she said of
that fact "To put that in a song is so ridiculous, but it was very touching." Dylan is pleading during this affair, knowing it can't last but struggling to hide how much he truly appreciates the woman, lines like You could make me cry, if you don’t know / Can’t remember what I was thinking of / You might be spoiling’ me too much, love. Dylan on this album is already at his rawest in most senses of the word, but it's here that it seems to jump off his heart straight to the lyric sheet. Dylan builds a world in this song directly on Bernstiens farm, his instrumentation going all the way back to some of his earliest days - simple and light. Dylan goes on to mention two French poets: Verlaine and Rimbaud. Situations have ended sad / Relationships have all been bad / Mine I've been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud / But there’s no way I can compare all these scenes to this affair. Verlaine and Rimbaud were two poets whose love was marked by aggression and abuse, oftentimes their reliances on substances causing great turmoil between the two, creating a Shakespearian tragedy, one that ended with Verlaine shot by Rimbaud in a fit of substance-induced rage. Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha / Honey, we can be in Kansas as the snow begins to fall. The coordinates are a reference to the street in Minnesota where Dylan was enrolled in college, yet it doesn't connect to 56th. He gives his lover a false coordinate, almost making his next statement about getting to Kansas before the snow seem just as misguided. Next he recites a proverb that is designed to employ hope, They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn before going right back into his own story, But you wouldn't know it by me, every day's been darkness since you've been gone. Dylan than begins to reference himself, calling all the way back to Freewheeling' to say Little rooster crowing, there must be something on his mind / Well, I feel just like that rooster / Honey, you treat me so unkind, a line that parallels itself to When your rooster crows at the break of dawn, look out your window and I'll be gone / You're the reason I'm a-traveling on. Dylan wrote the song in a way that follows the structure of a day - from dawn till dusk - so the use of rooster as a metaphor for how he feels falls directly in line. A rooster is known to crow not specifically in the morning when it is usually not as cut and dry as that, a rooster's crow is just an outward extension of how the animal feels when reacting to the world around it. Dylan says in the next verse that he outran the hound dogs and that's why he's sure he's earned his lover's love. People have theorized that he is actually referencing Elvis with this line, saying that he's become the new king of rock and roll, worthy of the respect he sees he deserves. This once more ties back to McLean's American Pie. Look at that sun sinking like a ship / Ain't that just like my heart, babe? / When you kiss my lips? is how Dylan ends this bluesy outing, in yet another reference to Rimbaud and his poem The Drunken Boat.
Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts is a nine-minute epic about a murder in a corrupt town. It’s layered, stuck together with a certain ambiguity of each character, their motivations, or even their connections to each other. The desolate town is described as a place where anyone with any sense has already left, leaving only the characters we focus so heavily on. The characters' traits and motivations are explained by Dylan through poker terms: the king in Big Jim, the queen without a crown in Rosemary, the princess of Lily, and of course the Jack of Hearts. The song also takes on many religious themes and metaphors that Dylan wove through the rest of the album. For example, before the violence erupts there's the inconsequential line of the leading actor hurried by in the costume of a monk, just another religious figure there at the scene of the crime, just like the priest who watches
the building burn. I don’t find it to be a coincidence for Blood on the Tracks was one of the last albums recorded before Dylan went through his spiritual rebirth for a time in the early 80s. There had always been nods to religious acts, figures, stories, and ideals but it was on Blood that these became true cornerstones of his writing, how one would have to look through countless verses and stories of religous texts to even half understand the stories he was telling in their entirety. This song also leans very heavily into another common tactic Dylan uses throughout the album, with the women being hailed between the madonna and the whore. This is seen particularly with Rosemary, the queen without a crown who when she takes her life into her own hands is described as being her one good deed before she died. Dylan speaks of her in the same way he speaks of himself often times, she’s the one pushed to the brink, yet once there she finds herself at the sole blame for what has happened. There’s also a fascinating commentary he adds about his view of justice at this time, something that would be expanded much further the following year with Desire and Hurricane, how even though it’s made somewhat obvious to the listener that everyone in the story is in someway faulted, it’s her whose hung by the man who never once was able to get his shit together any other time. Rosemary on the gallows, she didn’t even blink / The hanging judge was sober, he hadn’t had a drink. Author of Bob Dylan: All the Songs Philippe Margotin said of the song "How to interpret the song? All protagonists seem to play with their life as if it were a game of chance. There is no doubt what Dylan thought of justice, embodied by an alcoholic judge, imposing sentences with merciless severity."
"If You See Her, Say Hello has been written down with the ink still wet from last night's tears." - Clinton Heylin, 2010
If you see her say hello, she might be in Tangier / She left here last early Spring, is living there, I hear once more goes back to Dylans recurring theme of Sara and Spring, how often he mentions her in relation to the season, the flowers, or the sun. The song is very similar to Girl From the North Country , a pleading to stay but a well wish in place for respect. She may think I've forgotten her, don't tell her it isn't so is a line with a particular sadness about it. The admission she may be better off if she forgets him forever than be reminded of his prescence in the world is something particularly striking. We had a falling out, like lovers often will he recites for the audience, the unknowing messenger of his last love letter to her, Though our separation, it pierced me to the heart / She still lives inside me, we've never been apart calls back to It's like I lost my twin. There is a way he writes about Sara that even when his work points to his frustrations with her and oftentimes his own unhappiness and wrongdoing, his love for her was larger than anything that eventually tore them apart. Always have respected her for doing what she did to get free / Whatever makes her happy, I won't stand in her way. Dylan writing here comes across like an honest confessional, as if he's talking to a priest or an unlucky friend who gets stuck with his broken hearted rambling. It connects to Idiot Wind in another way, with the line able to read as Sara
being free Dylan, where as Zimmerman is
almost always stuck with him. It reads like the aftermath of a mention of someone who was long forgotten, whose mere name brings a wave of emotions that are uncomfortable to grapple with. He points inward most here, putting himself down every time he lifts her up. I see a lot of people as I make the rounds / And I hear her name here and there as I go from town to town / I've never gotten used to it, just learned to turn it off / Either I'm too sensitive or else I'm gettin' soft. Here lies one of the most interesting pieces of the album, Dylan's admission that he will never be used to them being separated, her name will always jolt him for a reason he can't seem to explain away. It's what makes the album as important as it is, the raw sense in which Dylan speaks of everything he feels during one of his most turbulent times. It spoke to those who went through the same things, and inspired batches of people to look inward on themselves. Dylan describing himself as sensitive or soft for displaying these emotions falls back into the realization that while he has been vulnerable, it still doesn't sit right to be. To be a man in 1974, pouring your heart out in a song for a woman you write about in every emotion and manner was not the status quo, making it even more off-center. I replay the past, I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast / If she's passin' back this way, I'm not that hard to find / Tell her she can look me up if she's got the time. Dylan negates his impact once more, putting himself down after realizing he was thrust back into the past with her once more, ending on a line that could be seen two ways: that he hopes she finds him or that she never will. Shelter From the Storm combines the madonna/whore complex and religous themes that have popped up through the rest of the album and combines them into one narrative. It portrays love as an act of redemption, how the woman he speaks of pulls him from his own issues. I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form / 'Come in,' she said, 'I'll give you shelter from the storm.' Dylan once more portrays himself in a biblical sense, how he was created from a life of turmoil and needs a divine intervention to make him human as opposed to a creature of God's struggles. He once more places upon Sara this idea that she is a holy figure. Someone so divine she spoke to him like an angel sent upon him from God. This becomes particularly prevalent in verse five, with Dylan writing, With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair / She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns. It places Sara in the limbo of the Madonna/Whore complex but with less of a weight upon the latter. She is unattainable, untainted, holy, and divine, she is everything but human. While Dylan always tried to push away the narrative he was a holy prophet, he still found himself doing the same thing to the woman he viewed as knowing more than the world at large. The song is about a love-sick narrator, someone who has lost his love but still thinks upon her fondly.
Dylan ends the album with Buckets of Rain, where he references The Sound of Music with the line Buckets of moonbeams in my hand, referencing the song Maria with the line How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? a line referencing the nature of the titular Maria not being as easily definable as so many women of her time, standing out as beam unattainable and perfectly content from the world. The following verse would see Dylan describing himself I'm meek and hard as an oak / I've seen pretty people disappear like smoke. Tom Petty once described Dylan as a riddle wrapped in a mystery - something very keenly applicable here as he contradicts himself quickly within the same line, very similar to She was born in spring, I was born too late. Dylan then rips a page from Taupin's book, with verse three writing: I like your smile and your fingertips / I like the way you move your hips / I like the cool way you at me / Everything about you brings me misery. The first half invokes ideas of a love song in the vein of Your Song - something explaining each and every reason to love someone while never boiling it down to a simple 'I Love You' - making the words much more impactful. It's the undercut after that sets the song over the edge, tying in the bigger themes of the album, the admission that while even with no discernable reasons - life just wasn't meant for them to spend together. Everything about you brings me misery could be in reference to her frustrating him to the likes of Idiot Wind, or the failed love affair being almost too painful to mention. Courtney Love had written in 1994 in a love poem to then husband Kurt Cobain: I love him so much it just turns to hate. The dichotomy of love and hate, joy and pain, suffering and ecstasy. I'm taking you with me when I go to a line that loads a lot of baggage. The narrator has proven to be confused at the least and heartbroken at the most, something that makes this line seem a lot more threatening depending on the context it's written from. For one he could mean he carries her love even if the love they shared didn't last as intended. Taking into account the misery he showcases through Idiot Wind, the line also feels sinister, the idea that if he can't have her no one should. It's one of the things that makes Blood so interesting, the pieces of his heartbreak scattered along the stories he tells. While he seems to have packed up his anger almost hall an album ago, here he is once more feeling the ping of jealousy and anger that it seems he had forgotten. Healing never has been a linear process, the ups and downs are what make the experience so excruciating. It's one of the reasons Blood is so influential and so revered, it's raw and unflattering showcase of the broken heart is closer than anyone had ever come to describing just how it feels to have your heart broken. He was angry, frustrated, upset, guilty, ecstatic, shameful, etc. and wrote each of those things down, swirling them into a picture of a man at his breaking point that resonated with so many people by saying the quiet parts out loud. Dylan closes the album with the exact sentiment of the journey he went on with his own heart, telling the listener: Life is sad, life is a bust / All you can do is do what you must / You do what you must do, and you do it well, before he cuts back to Sara one last time, saying I do it for you, Honey, baby, can't you tell?
What Dylan did on Blood on the Tracks was catalog the emotions one feels as they experience the heartbreak that feels it will rule their life. He didn’t do it in one song, or even in the one blanket emotion of sadness. Dylan set a standard for the break-up album should be: bitter but not vitriolic, understanding but not naive, direct yet riddled with misdirection, a catalog of heartbreak that doesn't read like a divorce lawyers notebook. This certain formula has been drawn on countless times since 1975, the idea that heartbreak can be communicated in puzzle-piece sized stories that when assembled create an abstract mosaic of the mind of an artist at their low points. Each artist that has taken on their own version of Blood on the Tracks keeps the idea of disorganization at the forefront, as well as a harmonica can be heard on each, maybe a subtle nod to the man himself. The idea was most successfully done by two of Dylan’s most loyal disciples, Bruce Springsteen and Tom
Petty. Springsteen did this with 1987’s Tunnel of Love, an album that takes the hallmarks of Dylan while backing it with Springsteen’s specific sound, each song a different vignette into different stages of a marriage that showcases the disjointed and fractured the psyche becomes as it pieces together the heart's pain. Petty did this twice, in 1994 with Wildflowers and 1999 with Echo. Wildflowers is everything Blood is, heighted and honed to an even more searing pain, one that masks its riddles deep within its roots and proves Dylan’s point of heartbreak being easiest sung from the backseat with an acoustic guitar speaking more than your head. Echo is much more grand, each story even further from any meaning as the emotions become blown to a thousand pieces. Emotions would also be a big part of Taylor Swift’s take on the formula with 2012’s Red, a piece that makes the format the most personal it had ever been, becoming even dizzier and more unnerving as the narrator falls apart each and every time, a faithful follower of Idiot Wind found with All Too Well. Alanis Morrisette's sporadic delivery on 1995’s Jagged Little Pill is the moodiest of any imitators, her story relying less on vignettes of the relationship and more on the emotions that would take place within these scenes, an anger mostly vacant in Dylan’s delivery. ABBA took on the burden fastest with 1981’s The Visitors, their parting notes as a band for nearly 40 years. Like four ripped up albums of break-ups taped together, it takes Dylan’s storytelling and format to its farthest reach. Across these albums is a sprawling idea of what Dylan first represented within Blood on the Tracks, this version of a new-age heartbreak that could never be understood simply.
While Blood on the Tracks and the subsequent Rolling Thunder Revue found Dylan masking himself, his life, and his emotions - they opened up the most real version of him there had ever been. While playing his character, and while hiding his own story deep within the lines of others, he revealed himself as a sensitive man, one who was flawed but understood the pain he caused. An album so deeply entrenched within itself that it can’t be mistaken as anyone else's, so varied in discussion of it’s topic it can be written off as completely fictional, and an idea that spoke so well to the human condition that it was able to be imitated countless times over these past fifty years, yet never replicated.
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