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What does the expression ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ mean, according to Bob Dylan?

Sun 8 September 2024 21:00, UK

Following his infamous motorcycle accident on manager Albert Grossman’s property in 1966, Bob Dylan had been quietly going about his music. He experimented with different genres and voices, just as he had done prior to that fateful life and career turning point. But these experiments were more earnest and understated and seemed to pass the music world by a little.

Both folk and rock music had received a dramatic overhaul since the mid-1960s, and many began to question whether there was a place for Robert Zimmerman in either genre. They needn’t have bothered, however, as in January 1975, Dylan unleashed a rip-roaring riposte to the doubters.

Blood on the Tracks is the singer at his poetic best, profound yet candid, confessional yet mysterious, more nasal yet more colourful than ever. ‘Idiot Wind’ sprawls across eight minutes of Wordsworthian verse, and ‘Shelter from the Storm’ delivers a melodic refrain to match its wildly lyric eulogising. No song leaps off the record more than its opener, though.

‘Tangled Up in Blue’ was the first lead track on a Dylan album released as a single since ‘If Not for You’ in 1970, and the first to really deserve it since Blonde on Blonde’s ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’. With a riff reminiscent of ‘Desolation Row’ only more open and welcoming, the song shows Dylan both in full control of his work and emotionally bearing all – at the same time, for the first time. We hear his voice close to breaking on every occasion he yelps to hit the high note in the bridge to the title line.

And no wonder since, much like the majority of the compositions on Blood on the Tracks, ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ is about the breakdown of his relationship with his wife, Sara Dylan. The giveaway line is at the beginning of the second verse when he sings, “She was married when we first met,” just as Sara Lownds was back in 1965. He frames each verse as a semi-mythologised reminiscence about a different part of their relationship, bookended by the titular phrase.

This context makes the song’s title seem fairly self-explanatory, as typically obscure a Dylanism as it may appear at first glance. Its singer is “tangled up” in the web of ambivalent thoughts, feelings and memories about a marriage that’s run its course. He’s torn between regretting the “dues” he feels he paid during the course of their relationship and mourning his loss of the woman who he says “never escaped my mind”. The “blue” he’s in should be a straightforward metaphor for depression.

Except, with Bob Dylan, nothing is ever straightforward. In fact, the title of his song and the colour it references are drawn from the music he was listening to at the time of his initial separation from Sara. One album, in particular, proved to be a decisive influence.

So, what was the album?

In the catalogue for the exhibition that accompanied his 2018 book of lyrics, Mondo Scripto, Dylan recalled that when he wrote ‘Tangled up in Blue’, “there were a lot of albums with blue in the title.” He reeled off 1950s jazz classics Blue Train by John Coltrane and Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, as well as Blue Hawaii by Elvis Presley. He mentioned specific songs, too, like Presley’s cover of ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’, Roy Orbison’s ‘Blue Bayou’, and ‘Mr Blue’ by The Fleetwoods.

His mood in the summer of 1974 clearly attracted him to songs that use the imagery to represent feeling down. “The colour blue seemed to be everywhere,” he remembered. “I felt like I was being swamped in it… Or tangled up in it, to be more precise.”

There’s one album that defined his sentiments more than any other, however. And it just happens to be the crowning achievement in the career of one of his folk songwriting contemporaries. “Joni Mitchell had an album out called Blue,” he told NME in 1978. “And it affected me. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It just stayed in my head.” This is unsurprising, given that Mitchell’s 1971 features songs about her tumultuous relationships with Graham Nash and James Taylor. Her mood on the record clearly chimed with Dylan’s three years later.

“I wondered, ‘What’s that mean?’” he recounted, referring to the moment he first came up with the title for what is widely considered his best post-1960s composition. “And then I figured that it was just there, and I guess that’s what happened.” Blue was certainly playing on his mind. And there are worse playlists to get tangled up in than Dylan’s records of choice, that’s for sure.