Credit: Far Out / Bob Dylan

The 1975 song Bob Dylan could never finish properly: “It was open to be cut better”

Thu 21 May 2026 18:30, UK

Being a songwriter like Bob Dylan means that work is never fully finished on any tune.

Even though the lyrics might stay the same from night to night whenever you play them, a lot of the greatest songs tend to take on a new life whenever you play them at the right time and flesh out every single moment that they’re played onstage. And while Dylan doesn’t have too many songs that need to be perfected all that much, he felt that there were some moments where the tune sounded a lot better after he left the studio.

Then again, a lot of people would have preferred that Dylan give his songs away rather than have to hear his voice half the time. His nasal whine is still one of the biggest stumbling blocks for people who didn’t know any better, but when you look at the kinds of subjects that he’s talking about on a lot of his 1960s records, there was no one else who could have possibly sung those songs but him.

There are many tunes that hit on something universal, but Dylan usually sings a lot like he talks half the time. Any one line has a million different ways of being interpreted every time he sings them, and depending on his mood whenever he plays live, you can never be sure if he’s being genuinely sincere or sarcastic whenever he’s working on those tunes. But even in a catalogue as vast as his, Blood on the Tracks couldn’t really be made by anyone else when it first came out.

Dylan was already going through a messy divorce throughout the making of the record, and even if he wasn’t getting into specifics, you can feel the genuine hurt that he feels throughout every second of the record. ‘Idiot Wind’ is by far the most biting song he ever wrote about one of his significant others, but a lot of the beauty of the record is him wearing his heart on his sleeve on other songs like ‘Buckets of Rain’ and ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’.

And out of all the tracks, ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ places all of his cards out on the table right at the top of the record. The entire story of people falling in love, drifting apart, becoming complete strangers to each other, and then him trying to find his way back is the perfect short story, but even for a song that had all these specific angles, Dylan felt that the song didn’t get its due on the final record.

He was still proud to have made it, but he figured that the song would have been much better had he been able to get a few more verses in, saying, “In terms of trying to tell a story and be a present character in it without it being some kind of fake, sappy attempted tearjerker. I was trying to be somebody in the present time while conjuring up a lot of past images.”

Adding, “I was trying to do it in a conscious way. I used to be able to do it in an unconscious way, but I wasn’t into it that way anymore. That particular song was built like that, and it was always open to be cut better. But I had no particular reason to do it because I’d already made the record.”

But a lot of those gaps in the story are a lot better for the rest of us. We don’t need to know the nitty-gritty of every single thing that happened in the story, but if anyone has ever felt separated from the person that they care about, they can see themselves wandering their way through life just like Dylan is and wondering if they would have the guts to try and find their other half somewhere along the line again.

It didn’t have the same resonance that Dylan might have wanted back in the day, but some of the greatest artists of all time are defined by their imperfections to some degree. No one needed to know the exact number of verses that Dylan wrote for the song because the important part was being able to feel his pain in the verses that we did hear.