This Bob Dylan Album Still Has Blood In Its Tracks

Most people probably have an album that was iffy on the first hearing, but after repeated listening, became treasured. For me, that album is Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan. I first heard it when I was a freshman in college. Thanks to my father, I had been listening to Dylan my whole life, but this album was unlike any other Dylan album I had heard (and by this point, I had heard quite a few). Here was not the old-soul wisdom of The Times They Are A-Changin’, nor the latent spite of Blonde on Blonde. Not the spiritual fervor heard on Saved, nor the fraying resilience of Oh Mercy.

Released 50 years ago, Blood on the Tracks holds a unique place in Bob Dylan’s catalogue for its raw emotional candor. It paces the cage of its 51 minutes with the ragged gait of a prisoner’s confession. Its recording aesthetic shifts from song to song as perspectives shift within the songs, making the album sound as wounded, reflective, regretful, or enraged as the characters feel. The unifier is Dylan’s voice, singing these tales with the conviction of one who has survived them.

Dylan has famously denied that the album is autobiographical, stating that it was inspired by the short stories of Anton Chekhov and his time taking art classes from painter Norman Raeben. Still. The belief that the songs sprung from a summer love affair built on the stony ground of his failing marriage is so rooted in Dylan’s mythos that many people think of Blood on the Tracks as the ultimate breakup album.

The recording of the album is no less legendary. Bob Dylan entered A&R Studios in New York City in the middle of September 1974 and recorded all ten songs for the record in sparse arrangements featuring mostly him on guitar and Tony Brown on bass (with the occasional inclusion of one or two others and one full-band recording of the blues number “Meet Me In the Morning”). When Dylan left the studio after four intense days, the album was finished. Test pressings were made and advanced copies sent out to select radio stations and members of the press.

In the liner notes of More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol. 14, Jeff Slate calls what happened next “[o]ne of the great mysteries of the Golden Age of rock and roll.” Dylan began to have second thoughts about the songs while with family in Minnesota. On December 27th and 30th, less than a month before the album’s release, Dylan took local Minneapolis musicians into Sound 80 Studio and recut half the album with a band, putting those recordings alongside the remaining songs from the New York sessions to create the album we now know as Blood on the Tracks.

The test pressings and acetates from the New York sessions, almost universally regarded as some of Dylan’s finest performances, went on to become bootlegger gold, and the album’s “original” form gained Holy Grail status among Dylan fans. You only found these recordings if your friend knew a guy who knew a guy. To be fair, the Minneapolis recordings have their flaws. Dylan occasionally sounds restless and impatient with his material. The piano on these cuts is out of tune, especially on “You’re a Big Girl Now,” and the mandolin is egregiously so on “If You See Her, Say Hello.”

Nevertheless, Dylan’s hasty revision marks his ultimate vision for the album. While Blood on the Tracks received mixed reviews at first, it has since achieved power and magnetism that show no signs of declining. As of 2020, it has held 9th place in Rolling Stone’s “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” and it grabbed 7th place in Colin Larkin’s book, All Time Top 1000 Albums. In 2022, Ryan Adams laid down a full cover of the album, and on January 25th of this year, Lucinda Williams, Elvis Costello, Adam Graduciel (War on Drugs), and others paid tribute to the album on the occasion of its 50th anniversary at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Blood on the Tracks marks a critical moment in Dylan’s career. For years, he had been struggling to shake himself free of the designation, Poet Laureate of the Sixties. He finally achieved a measure of distance from that decade by planting his flag in matters of the heart and claiming it for his own. In doing so, he crafted layered songs that bear repeated hearings. The closer you get to this album, warts and all, the more the songs feel deeply personal to you, irrespective of how personal they are to the man himself. The album may be confessional, but in the sense of an everyman tale in which Dylan uses the disparate recordings to picture the album’s conflict.

“Tangled Up in Blue” opens the album with an anthemic insistence that turns longing (“she never escaped my mind”) into purpose (“I got to get to her somehow”) showing in a stroke that Dylan’s intuition to record the song with a band to frame his restless guitar strumming was right on the money. Relative to the rest of the material, “Tangled Up In Blue” is the album’s moment of optimism, even though that optimism is born in isolation (“All the people that we used to know/They’re an illusion to me now”).

It also establishes the album’s artistic blueprint for telling stories through shifting points of view (something Dylan credits Raeben for teaching him), even as it bears the recurring theme of love just out of reach. In nearly every song, a woman eludes the singer’s grasp, his commitment, his understanding. She personifies the love he desires, but never fully owns. “Love is so simple,” Dylan sings in “You're a Big Girl Now.” “You’ve known it all along/I’m learning it these days.” Taking that at face value, Dylan’s songs are less about love and more about the frustration and failures of characters struggling to learn what love really is.

“Simple Twist of Fate” dives headlong into this theme. Taken from the New York sessions and featuring just Dylan and Brown, it tells the story of a one-night stand brought about by “a simple twist of fate.” It is a stark reversal of the album’s opening buoyancy, but one that, like Dylan’s voice, pictures all the ways a twist of fate can cut.

The song’s stately pace moves from “the heat of the night” to the lonely morning after and the man’s obsessive search for the woman as he wanders “the waterfront docks,” hoping “she will pick him out again.” But that’s not quite the end. The perspective shifts suddenly, and the narrator appears as a character in the final stanza with this proverbial statement, “People tell me it’s a sin/ To know and feel too much within.” He implies that he, too, was once picked out by the woman, confessing, “I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring/ She was born in spring, but I was born too late/ Blame it on a simple twist of fate.”

Dylan takes the oft-repeated tale of lust and exposes the wreckage therein. His voice, covered in reverb like a boot-scuff in an empty cathedral, is devastating as he pairs obsession with gnawing loss, one twist of fate with another. Like his voice or not, Dylan’s performances are intensely vocal and the emotional focal point for the songs. Some of the best examples of his art as a singer lie in this record.

Dylan invests his melodies with a broad emotional range of spoken tones that match the intimacy of the New York sessions or the band recordings of Minneapolis. Whether it’s in the wistful “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” recorded in New York, or the seething band recording of “Idiot Wind,” Dylan’s voice is alive within the subtext of his poetry.

In “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome,” Dylan sings “I’ve only known careless love/ It’s always hit me from below.” He scoops up to “below” like it’s the almost too loud punchline of a raunchy joke, creating one of the album’s rare chuckles. In the eruptive “Idiot Wind,” you don’t just hear “I can’t remember your face anymore,” you feel the change in his voice as it goes from the shrill bellow on “blind” of the previous line to the empty husk of recognition as love turns bitter in betrayal. Dylan is the ultimate interpreter of his work. No one can convey the meaning of his poetry like the man himself.

Blood on the Tracks ends with this focus, the man and his guitar, a storyteller as potent in matters of the heart as he had been in matters of the conscience in the previous decade. “Buckets of Rain” is deceptively simple, but in his book The Ballad of Bob Dylan, Daniel Mark Epstein calls it “Dylan’s last inventive performance on acoustic guitar.” Dylan plays a rough finger-picking pattern where the bass notes are sporadic, the treble notes sometimes harsh, and the middle range subtle and mournful under his benedictory voice. In the final lines, he sings: “Life is sad/ Life is a bust/ All ya can do is do what you must/ You do what you must do, and you do it well/ I’ll do it for you, honey baby/ Can’t you tell?”

When all is said and done, Blood on the Tracks is a cycle of love and obsession. The more fleeting love is, the more obsessed one becomes with finding it again. But the more obsessed one becomes, the more fleeting the refuge of love is. As if it is a mirror of its own conflict, the album has, at times, been eclipsed by fans’ obsession with its legends. But with material from the New York sessions now widely available, the 1975 release has lost nothing from the years it has grown in the minds of listeners. From the bitter culture of 1975 to the wounded culture of 2025, Blood on the Tracks is the flawed and wounded chronicle for those who have lost love but can’t shake the desire to “turn back the clock to when God and her were born.”

Christopher Raley