15 - Blood on the Tracks (1975)

Summary

Blood on the Tracks was recorded in the month and year in which I was born, September 1974. I mention this for the sake of full disclosure - namely, I don't know what life was like without it. I wasn't in high school or college that year, experiencing my own heartbreak; I didn't rush out to buy the vinyl when it was released in 1975, nor have any expectations at all about Bob Dylan. If anything, I was learning to crawl or maybe getting pieces of bark pulled out of my mouth by my mother. Like the album, I was brand new and open to interpretation. My parents were probably listening to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Dan Fogelberg, or if I was lucky, Joni Mitchell. For myself, part of the challenge of listening to Blood on the Tracks is to determine what it means to live concomitant to it. Since I have always lived in a world where the album existed, I have had to figure out ways of appreciating it apart from the noise that has surrounded it since its release. Blood on the Tracks created an emotional dialogue as well as an emotional landscape around music. Whether Dylan intended it or not - and he likely didn't - it became a love album, a salve, for his fans to sing not only to themselves but also back at him; it emboldened fans with a vocabulary. The album expounds on the complexities of love, but it also embodies the contradictory feelings the fans had about Dylan, music, the times they live(d) in, and themselves. Blood on the Tracks is Dylan's civil war; from his secession from the union, to bloody battles, and an eventual but tepid reconciliation, Blood on the Tracks leaves both the artist and the listener scarred. It can be listened to as a series of individual battles, discovered one piece at a time, or one can step back and let the mess of it be revealed as a whole.