"Tangled Up in Blue" is a song by Bob Dylan. It appeared on his album Blood on the Tracks in 1975. Released as a single, it reached No. 31 on the Billboard Hot 100. Rolling Stone ranked it No. 68 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
Background and recording
The song was written in the summer of 1974, after Dylan's comeback tour with The Band that year and separation from Sara Dylan, who he had married in 1965. Dylan had moved to a farm in Minnesota with his brother, David Zimmerman, and there started to write the songs that were recorded for his album Blood on the Tracks. In the spring of 1974, Dylan had taken art classes at Carnegie Hall and was influenced by his tutor Norman Raeben, and, in particular, Raeben's view of time. Dylan first recorded "Tangled Up In Blue" in New York City on 16 September 1974 during the initial Blood on the Tracks sessions at A&R Studios. That December, working from a suggestion from his brother that the album should have a more commercial sound, Dylan re-recorded half the songs on Blood on the Tracks, including "Tangled Up In Blue", in Minneapolis. The re-recorded versions were radical departures from the original recordings, and each new recording included changes to the lyrics from the earlier versions. The New York version of this song is in open E tuning. Individual outtakes from the New York sessions were released in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 1961–1991 and in 2018 on the single-CD and 2-LP versions of , while the complete New York sessions were released on the deluxe edition of the latter album. The deluxe version of The Bootleg Series Vol. 14 also included a remix of the December 1974 master issued on Blood on the Tracks. According to novelist Ron Rosenbaum, Bob Dylan once told him that he'd written "Tangled up in Blue", after spending a weekend immersed in Joni Mitchell's 1971 album Blue.
Lyrics
"Tangled Up in Blue" is one of the clearest examples of Dylan's attempts to write "multi-dimensional" songs which defied a fixed notion of time and space. Dylan was influenced by his recent study of painting and the Cubist school of artists. As Neil McCormick remarked in 2003: "A truly extraordinary epic of the personal, an unreliable narrative carved out of shifting memories like a five-and-a-half-minute musical Proust." In a 1978 interview Dylan explained this style of songwriting: "What's different about it is that there's a code in the lyrics, and there's also no sense of time. There's no respect for it. You've got yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room, and there's very little you can't imagine not happening". The lyrics are at times opaque, but the song seems to be the tale of a love that has, for the time being, ended, although not by choice; the last verse begins, and ends, Dylan continually re-worked the lyrics even after the album was released; the version on his live albumReal Live has radically different lyrics. In the first studio version and often in live performances he has sung some of the verses from a third-person perspective, as opposed to the first-person point of view in the Blood on the Tracks version. Dylan has said that the version recorded on the 1984 Real Live album is the best. Dylan has often stated that the song took "ten years to live and two years to write".
Reception
Billboard regarded "Tangled Up in Blue" as Dylan's most powerful and most commercial single in a long time, saying that Dylan's voice and the "strong acoustic background" instrumentals were reminiscent of Dylan's early songs. The Daily Telegraph has described the song as "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." "Tangled up in Blue" is also published as one of two poems by Dylan in The SeagullBook of Poems.
