‘Tangled Up in Blue’: the song that left Bob Dylan speechless
Bob Dylan was never one to settle for merely good when writing any of his songs. Some of the best material of his career was about punching out against the biggest names in the music industry, and even when he wasn’t taking everything all that seriously, he still found clever turns of phrase that made people want to play his songs over to realise what he had said. Then again, even some of the greatest songwriters of all time tend to have those few songs that leave them with their mouths on the floor.
Granted, if Dylan hadn’t done anything past ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, he still would have been heralded as one of the greatest artists in the world. He had already been known as the folkie that everyone thought would lead us into the future, but the minute that he picked up an electric guitar, the public was either pissed or excited to see him work his way into the world of rock and roll so seamlessly.
And even when working on some of his more celebrated works, his best moments came from him weaving words together like it was nothing. Even if it wasn’t clear what a song like ‘Sad Eyed Lady of The Lowlands’ was about, there was no doubt that Dylan felt the song in his soul whenever he sang it.
Somewhere around the late 1960s, though, Dylan started to have a strained relationship with his own fame. The idea of being one of the biggest artists in the world might sound fun, but it can also be extremely limiting, and when he decided to take his foot off the gas, he realised that he had some dark back pages he never took seriously, leading to a lot of the raw heartache on Blood on the Tracks.
Even though most of this album is coated in Dylan’s trademark sarcasm, it’s hard not to see a lot of regret in there after losing his first wife, Sara. Things might not have been smooth sailing given the lyric sheet of ‘Idiot Wind’, but listening to ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, Dylan isn’t willing to count himself out yet, either. He knew that he was used to living the life of a drifter, but he figured that one of those roads might lead him back to his first love.
The song might not have been the easiest to get down, but after playing the tunes multiple times in different keys, the version that wound up opening the album was enough to send a chill up Dylan’s spine, with singer-songwriter David Odegard recalling, “Everybody just went quiet, including Bob. We looked at our shoes. It really did take your breath away.”
But there’s a good chance Dylan was silent for a completely different reason. He had put a lot of his personal life into his songs, but whereas most of them had been built around metaphors before, this was him being naked in front of his audience like John Lennon was on Plastic Ono Band, as if to let his audience know that he did have some dark moments in his life that didn’t make him the hero they all saw.
Dylan never claimed to be a saint, but the strength it takes to make a song like ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ is no small feat, either. It might not have been the easiest thing for Dylan fans to stomach at the time, but even if he admitted to not being the best partner, his honesty helped make him an even better artist.
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