100 Greatest Songs of the 70’s #23 Bob Dylan – Tangled Up in blue

Released: 1975

Genius ways heavy upon everyone’s shoulders, no matter what size pedestal an individual is built on. Bob Dylan had rode the 1960’s, one of the artists who’d both co-existed with it’s revelations and influenced it’s outcomes, shredding the folk synthesis and coming out of the other side more essential, more bombproof, more mysteriously potent.

That didn’t last. Rolling Stone critic Greil Marcus asked simply “What is this shit?” of his first album of the decade, the menadering double Self Portait, but although the follow up Planet Waves fared better, the time was filled with unfamiliar doubts as to whether he could recapture the past’s magic. It wasn’t until 1975’s Blood on the Tracks that Dylan’s stock fully rebounded, and that was due to a record which centered on the most human of experiences, the breakdown of a relationship.

Tangled Up in Blue was the opening track, the singer weaving a rolling narrative that flipped from story to story, an mapless journey full of vividly drawn places, people and perspectives that’s continued to grain long since the album’s release. Musically the song was as simple in form as the old days, a plaintive strut which familiarly did the trick of turning lead into gold, alchemy that in times past would’ve been hailed as genius. An end it seemed had caused a new beginning.