#44, "Tangled Up In Blue," Bob Dylan (1975)

150 Favorite Songs: #44, "Tangled Up In Blue," Bob Dylan (1975)

There aren't a lot of songs that I can remember the very first time I heard them. There aren't many songs that draw some sort of neat line dividing my life into sections entitled "before I heard that song" and "after I heard that song." But there aren't many songs like "Tangled Up In Blue," either.

My "first time I heard the story" kind of sucks. I was in high school, in an ill-fated independent coffee shop that had opened up for one glorious summer, at an open mic night. Some goofy old dude (who was probably like 24) sang it. I didn't know that it was a Bob Dylan song, but I knew that guy didn't write it. How could he possibly have? No one in Highland, Indiana could write like that. 

There's a flexibility to "Tangled Up In Blue" that I have always wanted to emulate. Most writing doesn't exist in so many times simultaneously; most songs can't masterfully walk through years the way that Dylan does in the story he tells here. 

Listen to the first two verses: The present tense, such as it is, is years after the relationship has ended. Enough time has passed that she may have gone grey, or maybe stopped dying her hair, or maybe started—it’s listener’s choice, which feels very intentional in the way Dylan wrote “Tangled Up in Blue.” Within moments, though, we're at the naive optimism of a wedding, then back to when they met, with tantalizing, lived-in details giving the scene some heft (what sort of jam was she in that he used force to get her out of?), then before we even sniff an answer, we’re on to the breakup, and a suggestion of a future yet to come. ("We'll meet again some day," he remembers her saying, as she left.)

And those are the most linear sections of the song; the next two verses may take place after the present-tense of the first two, or maybe this is another reminiscence lying in bed. Or both, hell. We have no idea. At some point, we’re off to 13th century Italy via New Orleans, as perceived by the song’s protagonist, who’s reading Dante (I assume it’s Dante). Then to another time and place entirely, back to New York, with the time and specific location left deliberately ambiguous—he’s on Montague Street, but whether it’s the one in Brooklyn or the one in London or it’s a mispronunciation of Montegut Street in New Orleans, or a fictional one Dylan just made up for this verse, who can say; whoever he’s living with there “started in the dealing with slaves and something inside of him died,” though who knows if he’s referring to the transatlantic slave trade or if he’s using “slaves” to refer to people with addiction or if it’s a metaphor for something else entirely, we are not given any information. Maybe it’s all set in the late sixties and early seventies, or maybe in this verse we shot back a hundred and fifty years. Maybe the whole thing isn’t meant to be taken literally at all.

To a teenager who is beginning to realize that good writing is the thing that excites him most in the world, hearing a song that contains all of this—jumps through time and place, an epic love story (even if it's really just the broadest of sketches), and all of the pain that even some goofus in a coffee shop with a guitar at an open mic could convey simply by singing Dylan’s words—is a genuinely definitive moment. 

It's funny; talking about the artistry of Bob Dylan is a cliche, in a lot of ways, especially if you did time as an artsy teenager who really bought into the weight of his importance, which I certainly did. I’ve long struggled with an impulse to kill that idol, and there are certainly opportunities to knock Dylan down to human-sized (basically anything he released in the past twenty years, but also everything between Nashville Skyline and Blood on the Tracks except New Morning; also the vast majority of his Christian era). That’s normal, a part of growing up. But if I'm being honest, when it comes to the things that made me love writing, alongside the books and authors that I cultivated as a list to get away from the cliches and the outsized idols, I'd have to put "Tangled Up In Blue." Thanks to all of the guys in coffeeshops playing songs like this one to rooms full of teenagers. You never know what you're introducing them to.