“Blood on the Tracks” by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan's most influential contribution to the rock art form turns 50.

This album review celebrates the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s most influential contribution to rock—an album that legitimately changed the course of music history.

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Genre: Rock, Folk

Label: Columbia

Release Date: January 20, 1975

Vibe: 💯

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Blood on the Tracks is, at its core, an album full of contradictions. It’s my pick for the warmest and most inviting-sounding record in his illustrious discography, even though he’s been far more wistful both before and after this release. It’s also the starkest, most stripped-down LP Dylan ever made, which is saying something for an artist who’d routinely move other sonic elements out of his way to ensure the words, the most powerful part of any of his records, were always the central focus. Most importantly, it’s routinely mislabeled as the best breakup album or, in the words of Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin, “the finest collection of love songs of the twentieth century.” Love songs as matter-of-fact meditations and revelations, not sweeping romantic gestures. You can enjoy these songs even if you’re not working through emotional pain, but if you are, I’m sure this one hits on a completely different level.

Most well-known breakup albums, like Adele’s 21 and Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love, connect with the listener through a shared sense of bruised pride. How could this individual choose another, or, perhaps even worse, a future flying solo instead of riding shotgun with me? Songs written in this mindset can veer from despairing to nasty to adamant in an instant, making it more difficult to rationalize what precisely a “great” breakup album wants to accomplish, especially when it reaches commercial blockbuster status. At that point, aren’t you weaponizing generalized notions of anguish for financial gain? Does that turn art into acrid cynicism? In those terms, I don’t think Blood on the Tracks fits the breakup album mold perfectly. It’s not about love or loss for me but raw, unflinching honesty.

Dylan began writing the songs that would make up this album in the summer of 1974, following a career-altering decision to attend art classes run by painter Norman Raeben, an artist who’d come highly recommended to the singer-songwriter. During this period, Dylan says his notion of time and how it works as a device changed completely, leading to him writing songs that, as he’d remark later, “took place in the present and the past at the same time.” More or less in parallel, he began a relationship with Ellen Bernstein, which Heylin describes as the point where his marriage to Sara Lownds began to deteriorate rapidly. The rock legend has dismissed this connection for years, saying the album “didn’t pertain to me.” But, if you ask Jakob Dylan, one of his children with Lownds, you get a different story. "When I'm listening to Blood On The Tracks, that's about my parents,” the younger Dylan said.

What makes the album such an exceptional listen—what keeps new generations of music fans coming back to it decade after decade—is its unmatched style and economy of prose. The finest example of how few words Dylan needs to tell deeply resonant stories is arguably the LP’s opener, “Tangled Up in Blue.” In the first verse, he delivers a detailed backstory for a doomed marriage by focusing on fleeting memories that come and go like rays of sun poking through clouds.

Her folks they said our lives together
Sure was going to be rough
They never did like Mama's homemade dress
Papa's bankbook wasn't big enough

Later in the song, there’s a flashback to the couple’s not-to-simple beginnings. The woman in this duo was married to another guy before fleeing town with Dylan’s character. He admits to “[helping] her out of a jam” but that, in doing so, he used “a little too much force.” It’s such a tantalizing line because of how much it doesn’t tell you. Did he rough the husband in question up more than he should have? Or is the inciting incident something much darker a la Double Indemnity? Like Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, the couple in Dylan’s song seem destined to rip each other’s hearts out.

Split up on a dark sad night
Both agreeing it was best
She turned around to look at me
As I was walking away
I heard her say over my shoulder
"We'll meet again someday
On the avenue"

The songwriting masterclass doesn’t let up for the rest of the album’s first side. “Simple Twist of Fate” unfolds like a dream, with the narrator wrestling with his feelings for a woman (perhaps the same one he spoke of in the first track, maybe not) he’d met by chance. The world-building here is so vivid and specific that it almost lulls you into a false sense of security, like you know where this story will end up, before Dylan hits you with a gut punch of a closing verse that snaps the story back to the first-person perspective.

People tell me it's a sin
To know and feel too much within
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

As heartbreakingly candid as that burst of vulnerability is, what’s fascinating is how ambiguous Dylan leaves any real-world references. That lack of tangible evidence, one way or another, is the real secret to this record’s appeal, I think. In the same way that fans want to graft aspects of Dylan’s personal life onto the album’s overarching story, more casual listeners may see more of themselves in these vignettes than they’d like. Even at his most sardonic (”Idiot Wind”) or bitterly patronizing (”You’re a Big Girl Now”), there’s something so human in the atmosphere he creates that you can’t help but be moved on some level. Then there’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” hands-down the most lovelorn song on the album. Dylan talks about only knowing “careless love,” stating later that his relationships “have all been bad.” What’s fascinating about the lyrical framing is that he isn’t simply attacking himself—he’s taking aim at his dubious instincts as a man and, to a degree, what he wants to but can’t bring himself to be.

Blood on the Tracks closes with the incredible one-two punch of “Shelter from the Storm” and “Buckets of Rain.” The former takes its title not from a Creedence Clearwater Revival song but Isaiah 25:4, which positions God as a “refuge from the storm and a shelter from the heat.” Throughout the song, Dylan details how his relationship is his asylum from the violence swirling around him in a dangerous world. In the fifth verse, she even takes his “crown of thorns,” which you would assume includes the burdens of his self-doubt. The latter song, featuring only guitar and bass as instrumentation, is arguably the most haunting album closer in Dylan’s catalog. It’s a deceptively simple composition, revealing new intricacies whenever I hear it. The closing verse always gets me, as it sounds less like a statement of romantic purpose and more like an anguished request for approval.

Life is sad
Life is a bust
All you can do is do what you must
You do what you must do, and you do it well
I do it for you
Honey, baby, can’t you tell?

Blood was seen as a commercial comeback for Bob Dylan in 1975. It peaked at the top of the Billboard album chart and eventually earned two Platinum certifications in the US. It’s routinely mentioned on lists of the best LPs of the 70s, a reputation reinforced with every new rereleased or boxset. Unlike Slow Train Coming, this record doesn’t give Dylan at his most bitter or resentful. Nor was he in the midst of a personal or spiritual reawakening. It sounds like I’m downplaying the emotional heft, but, in reality, I think the fact that you could call Blood a transition album is a feature, not a bug. By demonstrating how you could balance intensely introspective writing with warm, accessible melodies and arrangements, Dylan didn’t just reinvent his sound for the rest of the decade. He legitimately changed the course of music history by proving, once again, that the singer-songwriter format contained more multitudes than many gave it credit for.