Blood on the Tracks

Blood on the Tracks is a 1975 album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. In September 1974, Dylan entered the studio with a clutch of newly written songs, many inspired by his recent estrangement from his wife of ten years, Sara Lownds Dylan.

The Songs

Salon.com critic Bill Wyman writes that "the apogee of career is perhaps Blood on the Tracks. In his infrequent interviews, Dylan snaps when people ask if the record is the account of his breakup with Sara. In any case, with 15 years of fame behind him and the failure of a decade-long marriage in front of him, it is true that Dylan on this album looks at the world through blood-spattered glasses. The losses he is singing about seem fatal; his anger on songs like 'Idiot Wind' is Lear-like...

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"Early one morning the sun was shining,' the album begins. Dylan's voice is quieter and silkier than it ever sounded, or ever would again; each line, each word, on the record is articulated and, seemingly, meant. More than 25 years after its release it provides unexpected and moving moments. A title like 'You're a Big Girl Now' seems as if the track will be of a piece with his most condescending love songs; yet it turns out to be arranged, performed and sung in the gentlest of ways. Two lines in, Dylan sings, 'I'm back in the rain,' and a minute later, at some last emotional end, he whispers, 'I can change I swear - an ineffable moment in his most vulnerable song.

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"'Idiot Wind' is about truth, love, hatred and the Grand Coulee Dam; 'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts' is a meticulously constructed abstract western. The last track, 'Buckets of Rain,' is a throwaway -- rain imagery permeates the album. It seems innocent, until you listen closely and hear the easygoing guitar line that anchors the song echo and break, the strings buzzing against the guitar neck, the guitarist's hands snapping off the frets. And then you notice the album's over."

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"In the first verse of 'Tangled Up in Blue,' the singer stands hitchhiking on the side of a road in the rain, thinking about his dues," writes NPR's Tim Riley. "By the end of the second verse, he's driven with his lover to the West Coast and abandoned the relationship along with the car. From there, the song is a tableau of encounters that conveys an atmosphere of detachment from both his lover and the people they knew together."

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In an interview taken in 1985, Dylan said that "'Tangled Up in Blue'...was another one of those things where I was trying to do something that I didn't think had ever been done before. In terms of trying to tell a story and be a present character in it without it being some kind of fake, sappy attempted tearjerker. I was trying to be somebody in the present time, while conjuring up a lot of past images...I wanted to defy time, so that the story took place in the present and the past at the same time. When you look at a painting, you can see any part of it, or see all of it together. I wanted that song to be like a painting."

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The re-recorded version of "Tangled Up in Blue" utilizes a guitar figure inspired by the band, Joy of Cooking.

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In "Simple Twist of Fate" the narrator experiences what he feels is a passionate one-night stand, but when he wakes up the next morning, he sits in an empty room, wondering if the woman he had the night before is thinking about him at all.

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As described by Riley, "'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts' is an intricately evasive allegory about romantic facades that hide criminal motives, and the way one character's business triggers a series of recriminations from people he doesn't even know."

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Riley writes that "'Shelter from the Storm'...accepts bitterness and solitude as a necessary price for buying into love's illusions, the inward scorn that repays innocence."

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