TANGLED UP IN BLUE
“Tangled Up in Blue” is a song by Bob Dylan. It appeared on his album Blood on the Tracks in 1975. Released as a single, it reached #31 on the Billboard Hot 100. Rolling Stone ranked it #68 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The Telegraph has described the song as “The most dazzling lyric ever written, an abstract narrative of relationships told in an amorphous blend of first and third person, rolling past, present and future together, spilling out in tripping cadences and audacious internal rhymes, ripe with sharply turned images and observations and filled with a painfully desperate longing”. According to novelist Ron Rosenbaum, Bob Dylan once told him that he’d written “Tangled up in Blue”, after spending a weekend immersed in Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue. (More from Wikipedia)
For a time, Bob Dylan only sang his gospel songs in concert; he was often heckled, but that certainly wasn’t the first time that happened to him. When his older material was brought back into the performances, there were changes in the lyrics in some cases. In “Tangled up in Blue”, the mysterious woman who originally quoted “an Italian poet from the 13th Century” began quoting from the Bible; sometimes it was the Book of Matthew, but eventually Dylan settled on Jeremiah 31:31 – “Behold, the days come, sayeth the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah.” This Biblical quotation was included in the liner notes for Saved.
(August 2014)
