137: Blood on the Tracks, by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan (USA)
Blood on the Tracks (1975)
10 tracks, 52 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Bob Dylan is an artist I feel I should like more than I do. I’ve always been aware of his skills as a wordsmith, and I do really enjoy his blueses, such as the classics of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’ and ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’. But I think a barrier to my full enjoyment comes from my inability to listen to lyrics. It’s a weird thing – I can listen to lyrics, but it takes my full concentration to be able to really divine meaning from lyrics if they contain any depth whatsoever. It’s probably a joint function of having dyspraxia and having grown up surrounded by music that is either instrumental or sung in languages I don’t understand. Either way, it doesn’t really help my relationship to Bob’s material, where lyrics are full of rhetorical turnarounds, deeper meanings, obscure references and esoteric word-play and the music serves mostly to function as a setting for the words.

THAT BEING SAID, there’s always been something about Blood on the Tracks that has appealed to me. The music feels like a much more integral part of the work than on his previous albums. It is slicker, more interesting and with a fairly big ensemble, but which is used in a way that still feels intimate and close; it retains an acoustic feel, even though there are electric instruments used throughout. His voice is more mature than it was in the decade before – still high-pitched but less acerbic, still unique without being distractingly so.

Of course, the lyrics are still the most important thing about the album, and they are superb. Blood on the Tracks is my favourite Dylan album, but it’s only been quite recently that I’ve been able to fully appreciate that element of it, and that’s because of a set that came out just last year. In fact…

Bob Dylan (USA)
The Bootleg Series Vol. 14: More Blood, More Tracks (2018)
11 tracks, 60 minutes
Spotify (only ten tracks for some reason) ∙ iTunes

I think it’s really interesting to compare the originally-released version with this one. A lot of pieces that appeared on Blood on the Tracks were rerecorded a little time after the original sessions with a different ensemble to create the more luscious sound, and the production added a lot of reverb as well as making most of the tracks a little faster than were performed. More Blood, More Tracks presents remastered versions of the original sessions.

The one-disc version of this reissue presenting the alternate takes of every track that made the final album, plus one extra (it was also released as an exhaustive six-CD box set of every take from the sessions, but really, who needs that?). And they are spectacular. They are completely stripped-back, just Bob and his acoustic guitar, and occasionally an unobtrusive bass guitar in the background. The vocals are almost completely dry of production, so it’s as if he’s singing directly out of your speakers. It’s all so much more fragile and poignant, the lyrics telling witty tales but so often of sadness, loss and longing. The directness of the instrumentation and sound really hit home not only the lyrics themselves, but also their meanings and emotions.

Blood on the Tracks is still my favourite Bob Dylan record, but it is a great experience to listen to the flipside of the whole album in this way. It gives me a new appreciation for the album as a whole, as well as Bob's enormous skills as both a songwriter and musician. Now I just need to work on my lyric-listening ability and get stuck into the rest of his stuff.