Blood On The Tracks

Bob Dylan's influence on popular music is incalculable. As a songwriter, he pioneered several different schools of pop songwriting, from confessional singer/songwriter to winding, hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness narratives. As a vocalist, he broke down the notion that a singer must have a conventionally good voice in order to perform, thereby redefining the vocalist's role in popular music. As a musician, he sparked several genres of pop music, including electrified folk-rock and country-rock. And that just touches on the tip of his achievements. Dylan's force was evident during his height of popularity in the '60s -- the Beatles' shift toward introspective songwriting in the mid-'60s never would have happened without him -- but his influence echoed throughout several subsequent generations, as many of his songs became popular standards and his best albums became undisputed classics of the rock & roll canon. Dylan's influence throughout folk music was equally powerful, and he marks a pivotal turning point in its 20th century evolution, signifying when the genre moved away from traditional songs and toward personal songwriting. Even when his sales declined in the '80s and '90s, Dylan's presence rarely lagged, and his commercial revival in the 2000s proved his staying power.

For a figure of such substantial influence, Dylan came from humble beginnings. Born in Duluth, Minnesota, Bob Dylan (b. Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) was raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, from the age of six. As a child he learned how to play guitar and harmonica, forming a rock & roll band called the Golden Chords when he was in high school. Following his graduation in 1959, he began studying art at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. While at college, he began performing folk songs at coffeehouses under the name Bob Dylan, taking his last name from the poet Dylan Thomas. Already inspired by Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie, Dylan began listening to blues while at college, and the genre wove its way into his music. He spent the summer of 1960 in Denver, where he met bluesman Jesse Fuller, the inspiration behind the songwriter's signature harmonica rack and guitar. By the time he returned to Minneapolis in the fall, he had grown substantially as a performer and was determined to become a professional musician.

Dylan made his way to New York City in January of 1961, immediately making a substantial impression on the folk community of Greenwich Village. He began visiting his idol Guthrie in the hospital, where he was slowly dying from Huntington's chorea. Dylan also began performing in coffeehouses, and his rough charisma won him a significant following. In April, he opened for John Lee Hooker at Gerde's Folk City. Five months later, Dylan performed another concert at the venue, which was reviewed positively by Robert Shelton in The New York Times. Columbia A&R man John Hammond sought out Dylan on the strength of the review, and signed the songwriter in the fall of 1961. Hammond produced Dylan's eponymous debut album (released in March 1962), a collection of folk and blues standards that boasted only two original songs. Over the course of 1962, Dylan began to write a large batch of original songs, many of which were political protest songs in the vein of his Greenwich Village contemporaries. These songs were showcased on his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Before its release, Freewheelin' went through several incarnations. Dylan had recorded a rock & roll single, "Mixed Up Confusion," at the end of 1962, but his manager, Albert Grossman, made sure the record was deleted because he wanted to present Dylan as an acoustic folkie. Similarly, several tracks with a full backing band that were recorded for Freewheelin' were scrapped before the album's release. Furthermore, several tracks recorded for the album -- including "Talking John Birch Society Blues" -- were eliminated from the album before its release.

Comprised entirely of original songs, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan made a huge impact in the U.S. folk community, and many performers began covering songs from the album. Of these, the most significant were Peter, Paul and Mary, who made "Blowin' in the Wind" into a huge pop hit in the summer of 1963 and thereby made Bob Dylan into a recognizable household name. On the strength of Peter, Paul and Mary's cover and his opening gigs for popular folkie Joan Baez, Freewheelin' became a hit in the fall of 1963, climbing to number 23 on the charts. By that point, Baez and Dylan had become romantically involved, and she was beginning to record his songs frequently. Dylan was writing just as fast.

By the time The Times They Are A-Changin' was released in early 1964, Dylan's songwriting had developed far beyond that of his New York peers. Heavily inspired by poets like Arthur Rimbaud and John Keats, his writing took on a more literate and evocative quality. Around the same time, he began to expand his musical boundaries, adding more blues and R&B influences to his songs. Released in the summer of 1964, Another Side of Bob Dylan made these changes evident. However, Dylan was moving faster than his records could indicate. By the end of 1964, he had ended his romantic relationship with Baez and had begun dating a former model named Sara Lowndes, whom he subsequently married. Simultaneously, he gave the Byrds "Mr. Tambourine Man" to record for their debut album. The Byrds gave the song a ringing, electric arrangement, but by the time the single became a hit, Dylan was already exploring his own brand of folk-rock.

Inspired by the British Invasion, particularly the Animals' version of "House of the Rising Sun," Dylan recorded a set of original songs backed by a loud rock & roll band for his next album. While Bringing It All Back Home (March 1965) still had a side of acoustic material, it made clear that Dylan had turned his back on folk music. For the folk audience, the true breaking point arrived a few months after the album's release, when he played the Newport Folk Festival supported by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The audience greeted him with vicious derision, but he had already been accepted by the growing rock & roll community. Dylan's spring tour of Britain was the basis for D.A. Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back, a film that captures the songwriter's edgy charisma and charm.

Dylan made his breakthrough to the pop audience in the summer of 1965, when "Like a Rolling Stone" became a number two hit. Driven by a circular organ riff and a steady beat, the six-minute single broke the barrier of the three-minute pop single. Dylan became the subject of innumerable articles, and his lyrics became the subject of literary analyses across the U.S. and U.K. Well over 100 artists covered his songs between 1964 and 1966; the Byrds and the Turtles, in particular, had big hits with his compositions. Highway 61 Revisited, his first full-fledged rock & roll album, became a Top Ten hit shortly after its summer 1965 release. "Positively 4th Street" and "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" became Top Ten hits in the fall of 1965 and spring of 1966, respectively. Following the May 1966 release of the double album Blonde on Blonde, he had sold over ten million records around the world.

During the fall of 1965, Dylan hired the Hawks, formerly Ronnie Hawkins' backing group, as his touring band. the Hawks, who changed their name to the Band in 1968, would become Dylan's most famous backing band, primarily because of their intuitive chemistry and "wild, thin mercury sound," but also because of their British tour in the spring of 1966. The tour was the first time the British had heard the electric Dylan, and their reaction was disagreeable and violent. At the Manchester concert (long mistakenly identified as the show from London's Royal Albert Hall), an audience member called Dylan "Judas," inspiring a positively vicious version of "Like a Rolling Stone" from Dylan and the band. The performance was immortalized on countless bootleg albums (an official release finally surfaced in 1998), and it indicates the intensity of Dylan in the middle of 1966. He had assumed control of Pennebaker's second Dylan documentary, Eat the Document, and was under deadline to complete his book Tarantula, as well as record a new record. Following the British tour, he returned to America.

On July 29, 1966, he was injured in a motorcycle accident outside of his home in Woodstock, New York, suffering injuries to his neck vertebrae and a concussion. Details of the accident remain elusive -- he was reportedly in critical condition for a week and had amnesia -- and some biographers have questioned its severity, but the event was a pivotal turning point in his career. After the accident, Dylan became a recluse, disappearing into his home in Woodstock and raising his family with his wife, Sara. After a few months, he retreated with the Band to a rented house, subsequently dubbed Big Pink, in West Saugerties to record a number of demos. For several months, Dylan and the Band recorded an enormous amount of material, ranging from old folk, country, and blues songs to newly written originals. The songs indicated that Dylan's songwriting had undergone a metamorphosis, becoming streamlined and more direct. Similarly, his music had changed, owing less to traditional rock & roll, and demonstrating heavy country, blues, and traditional folk influences. None of the Big Pink recordings was intended to be released, but tapes from the sessions were circulated by Dylan's music publisher with the intent of generating cover versions. Copies of these tapes, as well as other songs, were available on illegal bootleg albums by the end of the '60s; it was the first time that bootleg copies of unreleased recordings became widely circulated. Portions of the tapes were officially released in 1975 as the double album The Basement Tapes.

While Dylan was in seclusion, rock & roll had become heavier and artier in the wake of the psychedelic revolution. When Dylan returned with John Wesley Harding in December of 1967, its quiet, country ambience was a surprise to the general public, but it was a significant hit, peaking at number two in the U.S. and number one in the U.K. Furthermore, the record arguably became the first significant country-rock record to be released, setting the stage for efforts by the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers later in 1969.

Dylan followed his country inclinations on his next album, 1969's Nashville Skyline, which was recorded in Nashville with several of the country industry's top session men. While the album was a hit, spawning the Top Ten single "Lay Lady Lay," it was criticized in some quarters for uneven material. The mixed reception was the beginning of a full-blown backlash that arrived with the double album Self Portrait. Released early in June of 1970, the album was a hodgepodge of covers, live tracks, re-interpretations, and new songs greeted with negative reviews from all quarters of the press. Dylan followed the album quickly with New Morning, which was hailed as a comeback.

Following the release of New Morning, Dylan began to wander restlessly. He moved back to Greenwich Village, he finally published Tarantula in November of 1970, and he performed at the Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971. During 1972, he began his acting career by playing Alias in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which was released in 1973. He also wrote the soundtrack for the film, which featured "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," his biggest hit since "Lay Lady Lay." The Pat Garrett soundtrack was the final record released under his Columbia contract before he moved to David Geffen's fledgling Asylum Records. As retaliation, Columbia assembled Dylan, a collection of Self Portrait outtakes, for release at the end of 1973. Dylan only recorded two albums -- including 1974's Planet Waves, coincidentally his first number one album -- before he moved back to Columbia. The Band supported Dylan on Planet Waves and its accompanying tour, which became the most successful tour in rock & roll history; it was captured on 1974's double live album Before the Flood.

Dylan's 1974 tour was the beginning of a comeback culminating with 1975's Blood on the Tracks. Largely inspired by the disintegration of his marriage, Blood on the Tracks was hailed as a return to form by critics and it became his second number one album. After jamming with folkies in Greenwich Village, Dylan decided to launch a gigantic tour, loosely based on traveling medicine shows. Lining up an extensive list of supporting musicians -- including Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Arlo Guthrie, Mick Ronson, Roger McGuinn, and poet Allen Ginsberg -- Dylan dubbed the tour the Rolling Thunder Revue and set out on the road in the fall of 1975. For the next year, the Rolling Thunder Revue toured on and off, with Dylan filming many of the concerts for a future film. During the tour, Desire was released to considerable acclaim and success, spending five weeks on the top of the charts. Throughout the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan showcased "Hurricane," a protest song he had written about boxer Rubin Carter, who had been unjustly imprisoned for murder. The live album Hard Rain was released at the end of the tour. Dylan released Renaldo and Clara, a four-hour film based on the Rolling Thunder tour, to poor reviews in early 1978.

Early in 1978, Dylan set out on another extensive tour, this time backed by a band that resembled a Las Vegas lounge act. The group was featured on the 1978 album Street Legal and the 1979 live album At Budokan. At the conclusion of the tour in late 1978, Dylan announced that he was a born-again Christian, and he launched a series of Christian albums that following summer with Slow Train Coming. Though the reviews were mixed, the album was a success, peaking at number three and going platinum. His supporting tour for Slow Train Coming featured only his new religious material, much to the bafflement of his long-term fans. Two other religious albums -- Saved (1980) and Shot of Love (1981) -- followed, both to poor reviews. In 1982, Dylan traveled to Israel, sparking rumors that his conversion to Christianity was short-lived. He returned to secular recording with 1983's Infidels, which was greeted with favorable reviews.

Dylan returned to performing in 1984, releasing the live album Real Live at the end of the year. Empire Burlesque followed in 1985, but its odd mix of dance tracks and rock & roll won few fans. However, the five-album/triple-disc retrospective box set Biograph appeared that same year to great acclaim. In 1986, Dylan hit the road with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers for a successful and acclaimed tour, but his album that year, Knocked Out Loaded, was received poorly. The following year, he toured with the Grateful Dead as his backing band; two years later, the souvenir album Dylan & the Dead appeared.

In 1988, Dylan embarked on what became known as "the Never-Ending Tour" -- a constant stream of shows that ran on and off into the late '90s. That same year, he appeared on The Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1 -- by the supergroup also featuring George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne -- and released his own Down in the Groove, an album largely comprising covers. The Never-Ending Tour received far stronger reviews than Down in the Groove (the Traveling Wilburys album fared much better), but 1989's Oh Mercy was his most acclaimed album since 1975's Blood on the Tracks, due in part to Daniel Lanois' strong production. However, Dylan's 1990 follow-up, Under the Red Sky (issued the same year as the second album by the Traveling Wilburys, now a quartet following the death of Roy Orbison shortly after the release of the Wilburys' first long-player in 1988), was received poorly, especially when compared to the enthusiastic reception for the 1991 box set The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased), a collection of previously unreleased outtakes and rarities.

For the remainder of the '90s, Dylan divided his time between live concerts, painting, and studio projects. He returned to recording in 1992 with Good as I Been to You, an acoustic collection of traditional folk songs. It was followed in 1993 by another folk record, World Gone Wrong, which won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album. After the release of World Gone Wrong, Dylan released a greatest-hits album and a live record.

Dylan released Time Out of Mind, his first album of original material in seven years, in the fall of 1997. Time Out of Mind received his strongest reviews in years and unexpectedly debuted in the Top Ten, eventually climbing to platinum certification. Such success sparked a revival of interest in Dylan, who appeared on the cover of Newsweek and began selling out concerts once again. Early in 1998, Time Out of Mind received three Grammy Awards -- Album of the Year, Best Contemporary Folk Album, and Best Male Rock Vocal.

Another album of original material, Love and Theft, followed in 2001 and went gold. Soon after its release, Dylan announced that he was making his own film, to star Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz, John Goodman, Val Kilmer, and many more. The accompanying soundtrack, Masked and Anonymous, was released in July 2003. Dylan opted to self-produce his new studio album, Modern Times, which topped the Billboard charts and went platinum in both America and the U.K. It was Dylan's third consecutive album to receive praise from critics and support from consumers, and it was followed three years later in 2009 by Together Through Life, another self-produced effort (as Jack Frost) that also featured contributions from David Hidalgo of Los Lobos and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. He capped off the year with an old-fashioned holiday effort, Christmas in the Heart. Proceeds from the album were donated to various charities around the world.

Dylan released the self-produced (again as Jack Frost) Tempest on September 11, 2012; it debuted at three on both the Billboard 200 and the U.K. charts. The next two years brought acclaimed entries in the ongoing Bootleg Series -- 2013 saw the release of Another Self Portrait (1969-1971), which restored the reputation of a much-maligned era, and 2014 saw the long-awaited appearance of The Basement Tapes Complete -- and then Dylan threw a curve ball for his next studio album. Released in February 2015, Shadows in the Night found the singer/songwriter devoting himself to selections from the Great American Songbook in the pre-rock & roll era. Every one of the ten songs had previously been recorded by Frank Sinatra, and Dylan's album was his version of Sinatra's saloon songs, arranged by his own touring band. Shadows in the Night debuted at seven in the U.S. and at number one in the U.K. It was followed in the autumn by the next installment in The Bootleg Series, The Cutting Edge 1965-1966. Available in three editions -- a double-disc distillation, a comprehensive six-disc box, and a complete, limited-edition 18-CD set -- The Cutting Edge 1965-1966 collected unreleased (and unbootlegged) outtakes from the recording of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.

In May 2016, Dylan returned with Fallen Angels, his second Sinatra-inspired collection of songs from the Great American Songbook; it debuted at number seven on the Billboard charts. Later that year, Columbia/Legacy released The 1966 Live Recordings, a 36-disc box set containing every known recording from that pivotal year, but its release was overshadowed by Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in the autumn of 2016. Dylan continued his exploration of the Great American Songbook with the March 2017 release of Triplicate, a triple album containing three thematically arranged collections of pop standards. Entitled Trouble No More 1979-1981, the 13th volume of The Bootleg Series spotlighted Dylan's Christian era in the early '80s and arrived in November 2017. Live 1962-1966: Rare Performances from the Copyright Collections, a double-disc set of highlights culled from previously released rarities collections, appeared in July 2018. Four months later, the six-disc deluxe version of More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 14 appeared. It contained all known studio recordings -- full and partial -- that eventually resulted in the classic Blood on the Tracks in 1975. Dylan further explored his 1975 archives in 2019, teaming with director Martin Scorsese for the documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. The film appeared in June, accompanied by a 14-disc box called The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings. Later in 2019, The Bootleg Series, Vol. 15: Travelin' Thru -- a triple-disc set concentrating on Dylan's Nashville recordings of the late '60s, highlighted by his sessions with Johnny Cash -- was released.

Dylan released "Murder Most Foul," a nearly 17-minute track about the JFK assassination, on March 27, 2020. It was his first original song in eight years, and it was quickly followed by "I Contain Multitudes" and "False Prophet," a pair of singles that announced the arrival of his 39th studio album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, on June 19, 2020. Rough and Rowdy Ways debuted at number one on Billboard upon its release; it entered the U.K. charts at number one. The outtakes collection 1970 -- a set featuring unreleased material from the Self Portrait and New Morning sessions, including recordings with George Harrison -- appeared in February 2021. In September, Springtime in New York: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 16 (1980-1985) was released. Easily one of the artist's most provocative periods, it focused on the years that birthed Shot of Love, Infidels, and Empire Burlesque, with numerous unreleased outtakes, alternate takes, rehearsal recordings, and live performances.

—Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Following on the heels of an album where he repudiated his past with his greatest backing band, Blood on the Tracks finds Bob Dylan, in a way, retreating to the past, recording a largely quiet, acoustic-based album. But this is hardly nostalgia -- this is the sound of an artist returning to his strengths, what feels most familiar, as he accepts a traumatic situation, namely the breakdown of his marriage. This is an album alternately bitter, sorrowful, regretful, and peaceful, easily the closest he ever came to wearing his emotions on his sleeve. That's not to say that it's an explicitly confessional record, since many songs are riddles or allegories, yet the warmth of the music makes it feel that way. The original version of the album was even quieter -- first takes of "Idiot Wind" and "Tangled Up in Blue," available on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3, are hushed and quiet (excised verses are quoted in the liner notes, but not heard on the record) -- but Blood on the Tracks remains an intimate, revealing affair since these harsher takes let his anger surface the way his sadness does elsewhere. As such, it's an affecting, unbearably poignant record, not because it's a glimpse into his soul, but because the songs are remarkably clear-eyed and sentimental, lovely and melancholy at once. And, in a way, it's best that he was backed with studio musicians here, since the professional, understated backing lets the songs and emotion stand at the forefront. Dylan made albums more influential than this, but he never made one better.

—Stephen Thomas Erlewine

One doesn't have to be a broken-hearted straight male (or even a Nobel Prize voter) to fall in love with Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, but it might help. Filled with open-ended and often gender-specific pronouns, the yous, hers, hes, shes, and theys remain unnamed on all but one of the 10 songs on the moody 1975 epic, each a glowing invitation for listeners to fill in the blanks with their own nearest available emotional devastations. Often referred to as Dylan's "breakup album," it's likewise become just that for many listeners, both expressing and absorbing great aloneness. Dylan himself professed confusion about the album's popularity. "It's hard for me to relate to that," he said the year Blood on the Tracks was released. "I mean, people enjoying that kind of pain."

But as plenty have pointed out in the wake of Dylan's Nobel for Literature, his music is about far more than just his lyrics, and Blood on the Tracks is a prime example of just what that more constitutes. Beyond the emotional wreckage, Blood on the Tracks might be Dylan's most welcoming LP, its music projecting an undeniable warmth. The disc-opening "Tangled Up in Blue" uncorks the feels via an experimental narrative that fights conventional linearity, but the reasons to keep listening are contained in the first 11 seconds of forward motion before Dylan's voice enters. Only after that do lyrics even matter, and (on Blood on the Tracks, anyway) he is pretty fantastic at both.

Blood on the Tracks is pleasing and complete enough to visit repeatedly, until the syllables become words, the words resolve into meanings, and all of it becomes internalized, a space accessible even without the presence of the album. Perhaps the least dated of Dylan's recordings, there is a nakedness to everything. Untainted by the politics and cool of the '60s or the gated drums and overdubbed productions of the '80s, Blood on the Tracks hits with the same immediacy in the 21st century as it did in 1975.

Just as much as Pink Floyd or any other mid-'70s LP-minded artist, Dylan uses the studio to create and sustain a mood on Blood on the Tracks, and this mood is what survives. Drawing from two sets of sessions and at least three configurations of not-fully-identified musicians to capture a singular batch of songs, the album is a full package of writing, performance, and atmosphere. Withdrawing an early version of the album on the eve of release, musicians from sessions in New York disappeared into the credit of "Eric Weissberg and Deliverance," and musicians recorded later in Minneapolis received no credit at all. Though he received no separate title on the album itself, it is also the first album on which Dylan himself served as sole producer, assembling musicians on his own, sometimes to confusing effect. While staying within the parameters of folk-rock, Dylan finds a rich array of approaches, moving between the vivid brightness of "Tangled Up in Blue" and "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," the soft-voiced late-night guitar/bass duets of "Shelter From the Storm" and "Buckets of Rain," and the pained autumnal crispness of "Idiot Wind."

"Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan" ran one of Columbia Records' '60s advertising campaigns, but by the early '70s consumers were deluged with multiple generations of New Dylans, each expanding from territory that once belonged almost exclusively to Dylan, from Joni Mitchell to Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen to Patti Smith. After a few years in the wilderness, when Dylan recorded for David Geffen's Asylum Records (and Columbia released Dylan, scraping up unissued sessions without his consent), Blood on the Tracks might be seen as Dylan's own assertion that nobody wrote Dylan like Dylan, either. For fans at the time, it was a revelation, both a few notches less cryptic than his '60s surrealism, but no less mystical, folding in techniques of his old finger-pointin' ("Idiot Wind"), blues-strummin' ("Meet Me in the Morning"), vision-havin' ("Shelter From the Storm"), and story-tellin' ("Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts") self, all while tapping into powerful new realms of vulnerability.

As a writer, Dylan had been through about three lightly overlapping phases over the previous 15 years—young and Woody (1960-1963), young and visionary (1964-1968), and young and happy (1969-1973), and Blood on the Tracks built on them while promising something more. Officially retired and raising children during the early '70s, Dylan had deliberately downshifted into a less complex lyric style beginning with 1969's Nashville Skyline, in part hoping to shake some of the obsessive global audience he'd attracted. New Morning and other country-pop sessions from the period found Dylan playing with some of the brighter textures he would employ on Blood on the Tracks, but his reluctance to write in the symbolism-laden voice of his earliest years soon resulted in a period when he "more or less had amnesia," as he later told an interviewer. Returning to active songwriting in 1973 and the road in 1974 with the Band for Planet Waves, many of his latest songs seemed to lack the all-seeing perspective of his earlier work.

Dylan would say Blood on the Tracks was influenced by lecture classes he took with painter Norman Raeben in New York in early 1974. "You've got yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room," he said of the new lyric writing approach that resulted. Heard most vividly in the long-arc narratives of "Tangled Up in Blue" and "Simple Twist of Fate," verses and lines present assets/images like shuffled postcards connected by what Dylan referred to as a "code." It is here that thinking of Blood on the Tracks as a "breakup album" becomes reductive, missing out on much of what the collection of songs has to offer, the "breakup" as much a concept as the bandshell concert loosely framing Sgt. Pepper's. Just as much as relationships are about more than their breakups, breakup albums are about more than their relationships.

Though the disintegration of Dylan's marriage might easily be spotted in nearly every song on the album, there are also meditations on the ineffable passage of time ("Tangled Up in Blue"), a transitory love affair in the present tense ("You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go") and media jackyldom and other bummers ("Idiot Wind"). For that matter, a full third of the LP's second side is concerned with "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts," a nine-minute 16-verse ballad that bucks the album's signature themes of time regained, implacable loves, and unnamed names. Though remaining convincingly jaunty throughout with a light melody that catches the details in forensic clarity, its drawn-out story is a chore to decipher. Unlike the ambient emotional narratives of the rest of the album, the linear ballad requires a full and present attention, a reminder of one of the ways that music consumption is different than reading. Reportedly once considered for a film adaptation, the screen may've suited its stage-directed characters better than folk-rock. Further separating it from the rest, the blood spilled on this particular track doesn't seem to be Dylan's own, detracting from the album's bigger picture and only underscoring the unifying power of the other nine songs.

Drawing on a range of songwriting tricks (including an open "E" tuning that assures that very few will play Dylan like Dylan, either), Blood on the Tracks emphasizes a feeling of raw expression. Singing live in the studio (with the exception of the overdubbed "Meet Me in the Morning"), Dylan placed his usual focus on capturing in-the-moment performances. And though his reputation for studio and onstage spontaneity is well-deserved, Blood on the Tracks also presents songs that he had spent almost all of 1974 writing and reworking. Personal, perhaps, the songs easily transcend their would-be biographies. If Dylan's attitudes towards his partners sometimes stand out as patronizing—"You're a Big Girl Now" acting as an equally infantilizing bookend to 1966's "Just Like a Woman"—they reveal more about the nature of hurt than anything useful about the songwriter.

One glimpse into the making of the album comes through the version that Dylan very nearly released, scrapping it at the last moment, after jackets and test pressings had already been made. Playing an advance copy at a family gathering in Minnesota in over the holidays, Dylan—at the behest of his brother—decided he wanted a brighter sound, less of a downer. Flexing his superstar muscle and anticipating Neil Young, Kanye West, and others, he had the album recalled, pulling together a band of local folkies in the days after Christmas 1974 to rerecord half of the songs. The New York acetate (most recently offered in 2015 for $12,000) is all late night atmospherics, mostly just Dylan and bassist Tony Brown, the sound of the former's coat-buttons brushing against his guitar strings. Though tracks have come out via various box sets, bootlegs of the New York sessions—sourced warmly from the acetate—are every bit as magical as the final product, a classic all its own, minus a clunkier "Lily, Rosemary, the Jack of Hearts."

In Minneapolis, Dylan brightened up the sound (changing keys on "Tangled Up in Blue," striking a lighter keynote) and toned down some of the crueler lyrics (especially on "If You See Her, Say Hello"). If atmosphere was lost (and it was, especially without the pedal steel-drenched "You're A Big Girl Now"), then accessibility was gained. Charting at #1 on its January 1975 release, Blood on the Tracks is arguably the last Dylan album on which a majority of the songs became standards of their own, part of the invisible canon shared at coffee houses, college campuses, or anywhere bright-eyed young pickers might congregate. In that way, it is also maybe Dylan's last album of originals to qualify as "folk music" in both senses of the phrase: the popular genre defined by the presence of idioms and acoustic instruments, but also the great shared body of songs with lives and language that exist apart from their studio recordings and original performers. With the Byrds and many others achieving their own hits with his tunes and Dylan himself often circulating unrecorded work via folk music zines and songwriting demos, this had long been the expected fate of Dylan's songs.

Imagining Dylan as a simple songwriter, the template of Blood on the Tracks—sad boy with an acoustic guitar and a handful of chords—might seem basic, until one tries to replicate anything about it, or even just strum the songs at home. Blood on the Tracks lives alone in Dylan's catalog, that open "E" tuning (which Dylan refused to explain to his musicians) often preventing the songs from sounding exactly right in the hands of others. It lives on in its own peculiar way. Dylan has seemed to keep "Tangled Up In Blue" in particular to himself, rewriting the song several times, both casually (playing fast and loose with the pronouns), and more formally, including a near-total rework released on 1984's Real Live. One of the few older songs Dylan has performed consistently in recent years, even newer verses have emerged over the past half-decade. Nobody covers Dylan like Dylan either, apparently.

Though the albums on either side of Blood on the Tracks both made it to #1 and contained hints of the same songwriting territory, via Planet Waves' "Going, Going, Gone" and Desire's "Sara," especially, they were only just hints. Some of Dylan's Blood on the Tracks persona remained visible via the two legs of the Rolling Thunder Revue, but the original open tuning never returned, and Dylan would soon bury his vulnerability, too. The surrealism would resurface in full force for 1978's Street-Legal, but the musical appeal didn't. It took another few decades for Dylan even to return to the warm string-band sound of Blood on the Tracks, coming closest on his two 21st century albums of standards, Shadows in the Night and Fallen Angels. For a restless musician, it was a combination of factors that only came together once, locking together to transmit themselves through the years.

Even roughly 40 years later, Blood on the Tracks broadcasts hurt and longing so boldly it has become a stand-in, the type of shorthand a song licensor would deploy at the push of a button if it wasn't so expensive and maybe too predictable. It manages a balance of old pain resolved and wounds so fresh they seem as if they might never heal, brutal personal assessment and doubt, unnecessary cruelties and real-time self-flagellation. While Blood on the Tracks can be a constant companion to listeners during periods of initial discovery, it (and Dylan's whole catalog) has also become something to be lived with over a long period and put away for special occasions. Functioning like a literal album, the density of the passed time and pressed memories in "Tangled Up in Blue" grow richer with each passing year. As with the narratives of the songs themselves, Blood on the Tracks continues to absorb yesterday, today, and tomorrow, promising it can sustain new listeners as much as new meanings, should it ever have to be called back into service.

—Jesse Jarnow, Pitchfork