Blood On The Tracks

Album: Blood On The Tracks

Recorded: September 1974 (New York), December 1974 (Minnesota)

Released: January 1975

Songs / length: 10 / 51:42

Blood On The Tracks was one of the earliest Dylan records I listened to. Sat near the boundary while playing cricket on a lazy sunny afternoon during my teenage years, I distinctly remember listening to this album on my Walkman from start to finish, and thinking I'd not heard anything quite like it before. The intimacy of mood; the poetry and rhythm of the words; even the humour, through gritted teeth. There's no other album in Dylan's canon that I've gone back to as often as this one.

In the time after Planet Waves, Dylan wrote 17 songs in his notebook, 10 of which were recorded at the initial NYC sessions. Dylan rehearsed and played the songs to friends perhaps more than for any album since The Times They Are A-Changin'. He knew he'd created something special, though it took time to get the record's sound right (and certain songs like Up To Me failed to make the final cut). The album was due to be released in late 1974, but Dylan's brother David convinced him to rerecord several songs in Minneapolis, to overcome the stark sound of the original sessions. This led to new versions of some of the more ambitious tracks like Idiot Wind, Lily, Rosemary & the Jack of Hearts and Tangled Up In Blue. In fact the split of songs on the final album is exactly 50:50 between the two different recording sessions.

You can hear the "original" New York sessions here (I prefer the playing on the original version of Lily... but in most cases I prefer the official release):

Tangled Up In Blue was one of the early songs in Dylan's notebook and was a creative breakthrough for Dylan in terms of songwriting (the story takes place in the present and past almost at the same time), likely acting as the spur for the album's other tracks. Dylan said the song was "like a painting", but it also has a strong narrative, laced with humour ("She was married when we first met, soon to be divorced / I helped her out of a jam, I guess, but I used a little too much force") and intense romance ("And every one of them words rang true, and glowed like burnin’ coal / Pourin’ off of every page, like it was written in my soul from me to you"). If I were selecting a small collection of songs to support the case for Dylan winning the Nobel Prize, Tangled Up In Blue would be among them.

As well as the quality of the songwriting, the melodies and singing are also exemplary, and the album is remarkable for demonstrating Dylan's genius 10 years after his so-called "peak". Pop music was still dominated by the young in the mid-70s, and with this record Dylan helped to create a new space for artistic maturity. That's not to say there aren't the odd moments of self-delusion in the songs, with Dylan at times imagining himself as the wronged party or heroic lover. In this way, it's one of Dylan's most personal albums since Another Side, and the bitterness of Idiot Wind's lyrics is reminiscent of Ballad In Plain D. Idiot Wind evolved a lot during the creative process, going from a self-pitying lament to a meditation on contemporary America through the prism of two star crossed lovers. One of the song's standout rhyming couplets ("Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull / From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol"), is worthy of Shakespeare.

Of course, Dylan made sure to deny that any of the songs on the record were drawing on personal experience, as his wont, but all the evidence points in the other direction. There are songs to various women, including Ellen Bernstein (You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome... she was born in Ashtabula), Suze Rotolo (Simple Twist of Fate), and mainly Sara (notably You're A Big Girl Now and If You See Her, Say Hello), the wife from whom he'd recently grown estranged. As the music writer Jim Cusimano said: "Where [Planet Waves] investigated the contradictions of domestic love and life, [Blood on the Tracks] resolves them - through separation".

Below I've picked out three important figures that haunt the album:

Sara: Dylan's wife from 1965 until 1977, and mother to four of his children, nursed him back to health after his motorcycle accident and was the cornerstone of his idyllic family life. By 1974, however, the cracks were appearing in their marriage. Until then, Dylan said in his Chronicles that, "outside my family, nothing held any real interest for me … I was fantasising about a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence". He hadn't released a studio album for four years since New Morning, but on 1974's underrated Planet Waves the darkness had reappeared, especially on Dirge ("I've paid the price of solitude, but at least I'm out of debt"). Dylan would write a direct song to his wife, entitled Sara (on 1976's Desire), in which he also admits that Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands was a tribute to her but, despite his protestations to the contrary, it's pretty obvious that Blood On The Tracks explores the emotions he's feeling about the break-up. He's metaphorically pouring his bleeding heart into the record’s tracks.

Chekhov: In Chronicles, Dylan says, "eventually I would record an entire album based on Chekhov short stories – critics thought it was autobiographical – that was fine." The album referenced is clearly Blood On The Tracks, and while Dylan's words strike me as another of his clever ploys to throw critics and fans off the scent, I'm sure there's truth to his assertion that Chekhov inspired the songs. Having read some Chekhov short stories at the start of this year, there is a similar sense of concision in Dylan's songwriting, as well as an elusiveness and an ability to shift between characters and from the mundane to the magical. There is also a Chekhov story, The Steppe, containing the line of dialogue, "They found him by the track of blood". The album was also inspired by a variety of literary voices from the past (poets Verlaine and Rimbaud are both mentioned).

Norman Raeben: After hooking up again with The Band, on both Planet Waves and on tour, Dylan recaptured his love of playing live and rediscovered his muse, but his time spent painting with mentor Norman Raeben also helped to unlock his creativity. Dylan himself has been quoted about the effect Raeben had on his songwriting, "I was trying to be somebody in the present time, while conjuring up a lot of past images. I was trying to do it in a conscious way. I used to be able to do it in an unconscious way..."

Though critical appraisal was quite indifferent initially, the album has grown in stature over the decades, and is now arguably my favourite Dylan record.

Album rating: A+