Tangled Up in Blue
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"Tangled Up in Blue" is a song by Bob Dylan. It appeared on his album Blood on the Tracks.
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 ended.
Tangled up in Blue is one of the most clear examples of Dylan's attempts to write "multi-dimensional" songs which defied a fixed notion of time and space. For example, the beginning of the song mentions a cross-country car trip, but towards the end a minor character gets involved in "dealing with slaves" in New Orleans; clearly the two cannot be happening in the same time period. Dylan was influenced by his recent study of painting and the Cubist school of artists, which 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."
The song contains one of the more famous mondegreens in rock and roll music: "We split up on a dark, sad night," understood by many first-time listeners (and still heard after repeated listens, even by savvy fans) as "We split up on the docks at night."
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.
The song has been covered by various artists, including Jerry Garcia, the Indigo Girls, Ani Difranco, the String Cheese Incident and The Whitlams on their Eternal Nightcap album of 1997. British Folk singer-songwriter K.T. Tunstall covered the song on The BBC show Later with Jools Holland. She released it as a B-side on her 2005 single, Under the Weather.
