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. Rolling Stone ranked it #68 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

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. 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."^{[citation needed]}

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 has radically different lyrics. In live performances he has often sung some of the verses in the third person, as opposed to the first person point of view in the Blood on the Tracks version.

Ron Rosenbaum wrote in Slate^[1] that Dylan had told him he wrote the song after spending a weekend immersed in Joni Mitchell's Blue.

Covers and references

The song has been covered by various artists, including Great White, Jerry Garcia, Half Japanese, Robyn Hitchcock, the Indigo Girls, Ani Difranco, the String Cheese Incident, Twin Valleys, and The Whitlams on their Eternal Nightcap album of 1997. Scottish folk singer-songwriter K.T. Tunstall covered the song on the BBC show Later with Jools Holland. Tunstall released it as a B-side on her 2005 single, "Under the Weather".

In the Hootie & the Blowfish song "Only Wanna Be with You", the singer (Darius Rucker) mentions that he is "tangled up in blue". "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 Scandinavian-American rockband Jungle Dreams, fronted by Kim Larsen, performed a version of this song on the album Sittin On A Time Bomb with slightly altered lyrics.

The alternative rock band, Queens of the Stone Age, make a play on "Tangled Up in Blue" with their song, "Tangled up in Plaid", from their album Lullabies to Paralyze. Aside from the similarity of its title, the Queens of the Stone Age song has no real relation to "Tangled Up in Blue".

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".

Barb Jungr, a British based award winning jazz singer, covers "Tangled Up In Blue" on her album Every Grain Of Sand. The album celebrates the songwriting of Dylan.

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^[2] as the fourth book in her Hugo Award winning "Snow Queen" trilogy.

Footnotes

External links

• Lyrics