“It took me ten years to live and two years to write” is how Bob Dylan once described Tangled Up in Blue.
The song not only opens the masterpiece that is his 15th studio album Blood on the Tracks, it’s key to unlocking the whole record. 🧵
The song not only opens the masterpiece that is his 15th studio album Blood on the Tracks, it’s key to unlocking the whole record. 🧵
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The immediate appeal is its compelling tale of love lost and found but its long-term allure may lie in the slipperiness of the narrative that unfolds.
Rather than lament a love who has just left, Dylan’s narrator reminisces about a past affair, wondering “if her hair was still red.”
But there are also strange switches in perspectives and time periods that suggest Tangled Up in Blue is tangling up its relationships.
But seeing things “from a different point of view” was something he had learned recently.
There he took classes with art teacher, Norman Raeburn who urged a multi-dimensional approach to painting on a flat canvas.
Each verse of Tangled Up in Blue paints an extraordinary scene but how they connect isn’t always clear and certainly not conventional.