The 1975 song Bob Dylan always felt was “too rushed”
I imagine it would be hard for someone like Bob Dylan to even keep track of the classics in his arsenal.
Anyone with that many perfect songs is bound to have those few moments where they feel like they need to switch things up, but there are bound to be a few people who would see him on his Never Ending Tour and feel a little bit cheated if they didn’t hear songs like ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ or ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. But Dylan marched to the beat of his own drum, and he knew that he didn’t want to be playing certain tunes for the rest of his days.
Which is part of the reason why so many of his shows are so interesting to revisit every single time he plays. He doesn’t want to spend his life adhering to the same setlist, so half the time it’s interesting to see the kinds of songs he manages to dig up. He may be up for playing one of his classics one day, and the next he will be switching things up and digging up some of his latest material or the traditional songs that he had cut his teeth on when he was a kid.
If you’re going to a Bob Dylan show, though, you’re not going to want to hear him tear through everything like it was 1965. Dylan has always promised to give the most authentic version of himself that he could at any proper moment, and while there were times when he managed to have an epiphany when he got onstage, like when he was jamming with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, there were many times when he felt he gave a little too much away as well.
Dylan could open up a little bit in his songs, but Blood on the Tracks was the first time that he felt free to talk about his relationship struggles. He had said numerous times that the characters in those songs aren’t necessarily about his fallout with his first wife, but when you listen to a song like ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, you get a really clear picture of what a relationship looks like when it’s on its last legs.
The protagonist of the song is taking the listener through every single stage of the relationship and making everyone else try to make sense of what happened. There were moments where their relationship was great, moments where they split apart, and the song even ends with Dylan trying to travel back to find her, but even for a song with that many twists and turns, he felt that the song was never fully realised.
Compared to the songs that came to him fully realised, he felt that even with the labour that he put into ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, the version that ended up on the album didn’t do justice to the song that he wanted to sing, saying, “I always thought it was written too fast, too rushed. Sometimes that happens in a song – just too many lines, as if I were racing to get from here to there.” But that rushing nature is what adds to the song every single time he plays it.
Because let’s be honest here: the man at the heart of the song was having his fair share of troubles, and having him stumble over his words is like him desperately trying to make sense of what just happened. He had his heart torn up and spit back out by the love of his life, and while he didn’t want to let her go, having that kind of messy end would have put anyone else on edge, as Dylan sounds on this record.
The folk legend has had a similar problem on almost every one of his songs that ended up becoming huge, but having millions of people relate to one of your works of art is never a bad thing. If anything, it’s a little bit comforting knowing that there are more people who have been in that same position when someone talks about some of the most painful chapters of their lives, and Dylan put into words the kind of emotions that most of us can only hope to feel.
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