“Tangled Up in Blue” by Bob Dylan

"Tangled Up in Blue" opens Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan's 15th studio album, from 1975, and it's a whole novel squeezed into one rolling song. Dylan wrote it and sings it, and it tells a story of love and its wreckage from shifting points of view, the narrator never quite standing still.

He cut it first in September 1974, then went back and recorded it all over again on December 30 at Sound 80 in Minneapolis, and it's that second, brighter take that made the record. The credited band gives it a restless push: Bill Berg on drums, Billy Peterson on bass, Greg Inhofer on keyboards, Kevin Odegard and Chris Weber strumming acoustics alongside Dylan, Buddy Cage on steel guitar, and Dylan's own harmonica cutting through.

It was the album's only single and reached 31 on the Billboard Hot 100, but its real life has been on stage: Dylan keeps rewriting the words and swapping the perspective, and he has played it live more than 1,600 times. Rolling Stone later placed it at 68 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.