In a world where uncertainty is everywhere, time often feels like a fixed constant. For Bob Dylan, time is something to play with. Songwriting comes with its own set of unspoken rules, from standard verse-chorus structures to predictable rhyme schemes. But there are musicians like Dylan who moved far beyond these basics and entered a different realm of songwriting altogether.
Released on January 20, 1975, “Tangled Up in Blue,” the opening track on his fifteenth studio album, Blood on the Tracks, shows how Dylan turns human experience into something that isn’t bound by time. This isn’t done purely for aesthetic effect. The absence of a fixed timeline is central to what “Tangled Up in Blue” is trying to convey.
“Tangled Up in Blue” Breaks the Rules of Conventional Songwriting
Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” is a doozy, in the best sense. Consisting of seven stanzas, each ending with the line “tangled up in blue,” the song presents a series of highly specific scenarios. When these stanzas are sung together, however, they form a nonlinear story that shifts back and forth through time. The first stanza places the narrator in the present, waking up and recalling a former love while preparing to head out to the East Coast. The second stanza moves further into the past, recounting when he first met her as a married woman who was on the verge of divorce. Later, in the fourth stanza, the singer and the woman appear to reconnect, though she is now markedly different from his memories, working in a “topless place.”
The song becomes even more complex in the sixth stanza, where the narrator is no longer identified solely as an “I,” but is also referred to as a “he,” despite no prior reference to a third-person male figure. This shift destabilizes the narrative voice and complicates the song’s perspective. However, the second-to-last line of the final stanza justifies the song’s temporal ambiguity: “We just saw it from a different point of view.” While “Tangled Up in Blue” explores the experience of losing and rekindling with an old flame, it also reflects how love changes across time and perspective. What the narrator feels in the present might no longer align with what he once felt in the past. In this sense, the song suggests the narrator is always tangled up in some shade of blue, a color tied to sadness, longing, and melancholy.
Speaking with Bill Flanagan for Written in My Soul: Conversations with Rock’s Great Songwriters, Dylan shared his thought process while writing “Tangled Up in Blue.”
“I was trying to be somebody in the present time while conjuring up a lot of past images. I was trying to do it in a conscious way. I used to be able to do it in an unconscious way, but I just wasn’t into it that way anymore.
I wanted to defy time, so that the story took place in the present and the past at the same time. When you look at a painting, you can see any part of it or see all of it together. I wanted that song to be like a painting.”
“Blood on the Tracks” is the Quintessential Bob Dylan Breakup Album
The sentimentality of “Tangled Up in Blue” isn’t isolated. The song is part of the broader breakup theme of Blood on the Tracks. Written during Dylan’s marriage to Sara Dylan, whom he wed in 1965, the album has often been regarded as a diary of his marital woes. Dylan has denied that the album is autobiographical. His son, Jakob Dylan, says otherwise. To Jakob, Blood on the Tracks is about his parents. Whether they’re good or bad memories, Jakob didn’t elaborate. On another note, Dylan’s tutor, Norman Raeben, may also have something to do with Dylan’s marriage, or at least the way he sees it.
About a year before the release of “Tangled Up in Blue,” Dylan took classes at Carnegie Hall and was influenced by Raeben. The painter and lecturer shaped Dylan’s sense of time, especially in the idea that the past, present, and future could exist on the same plane. However, in Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan by Howard Sounes, Dylan recalled that after his first day of class, his wife no longer seemed to understand him the same way. He described this as the point when their marriage began to fall apart, explaining that she no longer knew what he was talking about or thinking, and he could not explain it to her.
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Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” Inspired Bob Dylan to Write “Tangled Up in Blue”
If the title “Tangled Up in Blue” rings a bell, it is because it alludes to Joni Mitchell‘s fourth album, Blue. Dylan allegedly wrote his song after listening to Mitchell’s album all weekend. Widely regarded by critics as one of the greatest bodies of work of all time, Blue can be seen as an elevated counterpart to “Tangled Up in Blue,” with a stronger, much more unapologetic sense of emotionality. Although the choice of putting feelings into a song is a matter of personal preference, without discrediting Dylan’s talents, what makes Blue so powerful is Mitchell’s ability to transform the mundane into symbols of love and loss.
Specifically, Mitchell’s “A Case of You” utilizes a narrative technique similar to that of Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue.” Switching between past and present, she recounts an earlier time in which her lover once called her “constant as a northern star.” She later shifts to a life beyond that relationship, where she meets a woman with a mouth like her former partner. The chorus then confronts the idea that, despite physically living in the present, her lover will always be in her blood like holy wine — her past remains permanently attached to her.
