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Bob Dylan - 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 song has been described 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."

About lyrics

"Tangled Up in Blue" is one of the clearest examples of Dylan's attempts to write "multi-dimensional" songs which defied a fixed notion of time and space. Dylan was influenced by his recent study of painting and the Cubist school of artists, who sought to incorporate multiple perspectives within a single plane of view.

As Neil McCormick remarked in 2003: "A truly extraordinary epic of the personal, an unreliable narrative carved out of shifting memories like a five-and-a-half-minute musical Proust."

In a 1978 interview Dylan explained this style of songwriting: "What's different about it is that there's a code in the lyrics, and there's also no sense of time. There's no respect for it. You've got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room, and there's very little you can't imagine not happening".

The lyrics are at times opaque, but the song seems to be (like most of the songs on the album) the tale of a love that has, for the time being, ended, although not by choice; the last verse begins:

So now I'm goin' back again,

I got to get to her somehow...

and ends

We always did feel the same,

We just saw it from a different point of view,

Tangled up in blue.

Dylan continually re-worked the lyrics even after the album was released; the version on his live album Real Live (and throughout the '84 Europe tour) has radically different lyrics.

In the first studio version (NYC sessions, September '74) and often in live performances he has sung some of the verses from a third-person perspective (usually "he was laying in bed," but sometimes even "she was laying in bed"), as opposed to the first-person point of view in the Blood on the Tracks version. Dylan has said that the version recorded on the 1984 Real Live album is the best.

Covers and references

The song has been covered by various artists, including Great White, Jerry Garcia, Dickey Betts and Great Southern, Mike McClure, Half Japanese, Robyn Hitchcock, the Indigo Girls, Kim Larsen, KT Tunstall, Ani Difranco, The String Cheese Incident, Jennifer Charles and The Whitlams on their Eternal Nightcap album of 1997.

• In the Hootie & the Blowfish song "Only Wanna Be with You", Darius Rucker sings: Yeah I'm tangled up in blue / Only wanna be with you / You can call me your fool / Only wanna be with you. The reference extends a string of mentions of Bob Dylan in the song, beginning at the start of the second verse: Putting on a little Dylan .... The song's rhythm itself seems to be inspired by Dylan's original track.
• The band Cameo described the song as 'definitive' in their musical development and frequently opened concerts with a funk version of the song. Barb Jungr and Louis Durra have recorded jazz versions.
• The Belgian TV-host Bart Peeters, who is also a singer-songwriter, made a Dutch version of the song. The lyrics are modified by him, and as a result he tells a more personal story about how he met his wife. The Dutch title is "Prachtig in het blauw" ([looking] beautiful in blue).
• Texas Country artist Hayes Carll includes the lyics You was openly frustrated / you said Dylan's overrated / while singing Tangled Up In Blue in his 2011 song "Another Like You".
• The song is a playable track on Rock Band 2, as the most difficult song in the vocal section, and the final song for the player to complete in the "Impossible Vocal Challenge".
• Science fiction author Joan D. Vinge published Tangled Up in Blue in 2000[5] as the fourth book in her Hugo Award-winning "Snow Queen" series.
• A female artist named Sami quotes the lines, "We'll meet again someday on the avenue/tangled up in blue" in Michael Corrigan's book These Precious Hours.

The lyrics:

Early one mornin' the sun was shinin'

I was layin' in bed

Wonderin' if she'd changed at all

If her hair was still red

Her folks, they said our lives together

Sure was gonna be rough

They never did like mama's homemade dress

Papa's bankbook wasn't big enough

And I was standin' on the side of the road

Rain fallin' on my shoes

Heading out for the east coast

Lord knows I've paid some dues gettin' through

Tangled up in blue

She was married when we first met

Soon to be divorced

I helped her out of a jam, I guess

But I used a little too much force

We drove that car as far as we could

Abandoned it out west

Split up on a dark, sad night

Both agreeing it was best

And she turned around to look at me

As I was walkin' away

I heard her say over my shoulder

"We'll meet again someday on the avenue"

Tangled up in blue

I had a job in the great north woods

Working as a cook for a spell

But I never did like it all that much

And one day the ax just fell

So I drifted down to New Orleans

Where I was lucky to be employed

Workin' for a while on a fishin' boat

Right outside of Delacroix

But all the while I was alone

The past was close behind

I seen a lot of women, but she never escaped my mind

And I just grew

Tangled up in blue

She was workin' in a topless place

And I stopped in for a beer

I just kept lookin' at the side of her face

In the spotlight so clear

And later on when the crowd thinned out

I was just about to do the same

She was standing there in back of my chair

Said to me, "Don't I know your name?"

I muttered somethin' underneath my breath

She studied the lines on my face

I must admit I felt a little uneasy

When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe

Tangled up in blue

She lit a burner on the stove

And offered me a pipe

"I thought you'd never say hello," she said

"You look like the silent type"

Then she opened up a book of poems

And handed it to me

Written by an Italian poet

From the thirteenth century

And every one of them words rang true

And glowed like burnin' coal

Pourin' off of every page

Like it was written in my soul from me to you

Tangled up in blue

I lived with them on Montague street

In a basement down the stairs

There was music in the cafes at night

And revolution in the air

Then he started into dealing with slaves

And something inside of him died

She had to sell everything she owned

And we froze up inside

And when finally the bottom fell out

I became withdrawn

The only thing I knew how to do

Was to keep on keepin' on like a bird that flew

Tangled up in blue

So now I'm goin' back again

I got to get to her somehow

All the people we used to know

They're an illusion to me now

Some are mathematicians

Some are carpenters' wives

Don't know how it all got started

I don't know what they're doin' with their lives

But me, I'm still on the road

Headin' for another joint

We always did feel the same

We just saw it from a different point of view

Tangled up in blue