Blood on the Tracks

Ten songs in about fifty-two minutes, and the subtractive test finds little to take. Tangled Up in Blue must open: it holds the whole story in one song, a love lost and found across years and towns, and the rest of the record are its facets. Idiot Wind is the hinge of side one, the rage the other songs answer; If You See Her, Say Hello and Shelter from the Storm are its counterweights, tenderness and grace. Buckets of Rain is the compelled end, a shrug after the storm. The test bites twice: Meet Me in the Morning is a plain twelve-bar blues that restates a mood without a turn, and Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts plays the record’s triangle as a story with masks, but its near nine minutes are permitted more than compelled.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the end of a love is lived not once but in every tense at once, so that the man who remembers, the man who blames and the man who forgives are the same man, and the one who blames is found to share the blame. Tangled Up in Blue tells one love across lives and shifting pronouns, and the past is never past. Idiot Wind is the test: a long indictment (“you’re an idiot, babe”) that turns at the last verse on itself (“we’re idiots, babe”), the record’s finding. If You See Her, Say Hello holds love and pride in one breath; Simple Twist of Fate gives the loss to chance rather than to fault. The voice discloses as fully as the words. The limit: the condition is one man’s, and the other party never speaks.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Elevation is real and comes often, in a plain register: never grandeur, rarely transport, mostly the height of feeling held exactly, judged on voice and melody together. Tangled Up in Blue rises verse on verse until the refrain lands like a return. Idiot Wind is the dreadful height, organ and voice pressing a fury that becomes, at the end, almost pity. Shelter from the Storm reaches a hushed, hymn-like height through its many verses; If You See Her, Say Hello is grief held at a distance, and the distance is the height; Simple Twist of Fate has a quiet one. The other four songs stay level or rise only in wit. Five or six of ten songs rise, the highest very high in feeling and low in sonic grandeur, and that kind holds the figure.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Myth is built in two songs and evoked across the rest. Tangled Up in Blue builds a pattern of eternal return: the same love met again in other towns and lives, the lovers divided and reunited, the road as fate, and a book of verse by “an Italian poet” handed over as if the love were already written. Shelter from the Storm builds an old figure, the wanderer taken in from the storm, and lays over it a passion, the man’s clothes gambled for and a crown of thorns lifted from him, so that a love affair carries the shape of a salvation and a betrayal. Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts evokes a western as a card game. The particular stays particular: a hotel, a fishing boat, a basement on Montague Street. The limit: in the other songs the myth is atmosphere.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The inheritance is Dylan’s own folk and country records, and the confessional songwriting of the early 1970s that had already made the record of a love’s end a proven form; Joni Mitchell’s Blue (1971) is the nearest precedent. The turn is in the song’s handling of time: Tangled Up in Blue and Simple Twist of Fate move between first and third person and across years inside one verse form, so that a popular song tells a story as a modern novel does, out of order and from shifting vantages. The return to a bare acoustic sound after a year of rock with the Band was a turn too. The stake was smaller: recutting half a finished record weeks before release risked its unity, not his standing. Highway 61 Revisited, at 9.2, swerved further.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. The strophic song, the same music verse after verse, is the instrument of its knowledge in its best songs: Tangled Up in Blue’s verses change time, place and person over a figure that never changes, so that the form enacts the finding that one love persists through every change; Idiot Wind’s refrain returns the indictment until its last return turns it round. The sequence is counted here, once: the whole story first, then its facets, rage at the centre of side one, tenderness and grace late on side two, a shrug to close. The two sessions join without a seam a listener hears as a fault, and give the record two lights, warm and bare. The limit: several songs are containers in a familiar folk form.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence over fifty-one years. The record has been argued over without exhaustion: whether it is autobiography, which Dylan denied; whether Tangled Up in Blue is one love or several; who speaks in Idiot Wind’s last verse. None of these questions has closed. Dylan himself kept returning to it, rewriting Tangled Up in Blue’s words in later performance, which shows the song still open to its maker. In the recording, return yields: lines whose reference shifts as the pronouns shift, and verses whose order matters differently on each hearing, so that the same song tells a different story as the listener’s grasp of who is speaking changes. The limit: much of the depth is verbal and narrative, and the musical surface, plain by design, yields less on return.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The field is the singer-songwriter album of the 1970s and the popular song as a vehicle for adult experience. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that a popular song could carry a narrative broken in time and person, and that the confessional album could be a work of fiction and judgment rather than a diary. It deepened more than it reorganised; the form was there, and the record set its standard, while Highway 61 Revisited, at 9.3, moved the field further. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record became the measure of the album of a love’s end, a model later songwriters name for writing about a marriage and about time; its songs entered the repertoire of other singers; and it restored its maker’s standing after a decade of uneven work.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Survival is weighed over fifty-one years and nine months. The form is whole: the album as issued in 1975 is still the record sold, in print throughout. Presence is continuous and wide: the album is heard whole, its songs are sung by other singers, Tangled Up in Blue and Shelter from the Storm are in common circulation, and the record is placed high whenever its decade or its maker’s work is counted. That presence is credited as presence, not proof, and it is wide without being the widest of its age. The fabric carries almost no date: voice, acoustic guitar and a small band, recorded plainly, with nothing tied to a studio fashion of 1974 and nothing topical in the words. It stands far below what has lasted centuries.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing in one element, the voice: Dylan’s singing here is among the most exact of his work, phrasing each verse differently, spitting the long lines of Idiot Wind and holding back the grief of If You See Her, Say Hello, so that the performance carries meaning the words alone do not. The Minneapolis band plays with warmth and drive on Tangled Up in Blue. The rest is plain and serves: the guitar playing is basic, the harmonica rough, the arrangements minimal, the drums on Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts routine, and the sound of the record no more than clear. One element of the highest command over a making otherwise competent and unremarkable.

Score: 8.3 / 10

One law governs the record: a love that has ended is lived through again in memory, and fate and blame are weighed against each other without a verdict. The two most distant elements obey it. Idiot Wind, eight minutes of fury in the first person, and Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, nine minutes of a western tale in the third, both turn on a triangle, a betrayal and a fate no one controls; the caper is the record’s love story told as a card game. Buckets of Rain obeys as the shrug the law permits after rage; Shelter from the Storm and Meet Me in the Morning share the road and the waiting. The tonal range is wide, from venom to grace and wit. The limit: the musical range, acoustic folk, country and blues, is narrow.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, as memory, rage and longing; the couple is held from every side; time and memory are the record’s medium. The road and labour appear in Tangled Up in Blue, a fishing boat, a strip club, jobs taken and left, and a generation’s history is glimpsed there, the cafés and “revolution in the air”, and its scattering. The sacred enters Shelter from the Storm as a passion borrowed for a love; fate is named. What holds the figure lowest is what is absent or only glimpsed: the state, the family beyond the couple, the city as a society, the natural order beyond weather. The world passes through one man’s memory of one love, and little in it exceeds him.

Score: 7.6 / 10