The Optical Files #127: Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks (1975)

Today is my 37th birthday, & the random number generator obligingly gave me a CD that is not only one of the most important albums of my life, but is also one that I share with Tod, this blog's owner. I don't think I would be the same person if I had never heard Blood on the Tracks. Consequently, it's a bit hard for me to write about coherently, so you might have to settle for incoherence, dear reader. It's my birthday present to myself.

I received this CD as a Christmas gift the year I turned 15. For me this album is the smell of honeysuckle & fig tree; it's the untucked dress shirts I thought made me look both grownup & carefree; it's endless late night drives with a stupid disregard for traffic laws, cigarette in 1 hand & joint in the other, turning the radio louder always louder; it's sitting in the park watching pigeons circle the spires of the Pabellon Mudéjar because there was absolutely nothing else I needed or wanted to be doing. It's easy curiosity about the world & eagerness to try all of its flavors; it's tiny heartbreaks turned earthquakes through the microscope of inexperience. It's the 1st night away from home. It's a 25-way intersection with 25 green lights.

It's not just nostalgia that makes me think these thoughts. Blood on the Tracks is deeply invested in the past, with picking through the wreckage of relationships trying to piece together what went wrong, & particularly the choices we made that got us where we are. Every song here is imbued with melancholy, even the superficially upbeat "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go"--which can't help foreseeing the painful end of the romance even in the midst of its thrill--or "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," which uses the Old West setting Dylan was fond of to tell a simple story of a bank robbery whose richness lies in hinted-at backstories & the spaces between its scenes. The sum total of all the choices these characters made got them where they end up: dead, on the run, condemned, at a crossroads--& all the most any can do is try something different moving forward. "She was looking to do just 1 good deed before she died."

From the delicate interplay of the stereo-separated twin guitars of the intro, notes of resignation & acceptance ring throughout "You're a Big Girl Now." Despite the folk-rock presentation, it has the swinging phrasing & melody of an R&B song, & it culminates in some of the most emotionally naked lines Dylan ever sang: "I'm going out of my mind with a pain that stops & starts/like a corkscrew to my heart/ever since we've been apart," punctuated by what might be an R&B singer's vamping but emerges from Dylan's throat as a primal howl of anguish. More anguish hides in plain sight in "If You See Her, Say Hello," a sister song to his earlier "Girl From the North Country," except here the circumstances of the breakup are left less to the imagination. The singer's emotional state depends on his ability to suppress his grief: "I've never gotten used to it, I've just learned to turn it off." Lyrics like these were moving to me back when I thought I knew heartbreak--now that I really do, well...corkscrew to the heart indeed.

There’s blood on the tracks, but no body. Whatever happened in this place, someone survived it & continued on down the line. This Dylan--humbled, wounded but still moving forward--is acutely aware that life is a series of decisions. He was 34 when he made this album, a few years younger than I am now. Was he starting to wonder, like I do, whether the bulk of his major life choices were already behind him? Do we only get a certain number? Is there a way to revise them or earn more? Will we ever know?

Is Blood on the Tracks the best Bob Dylan album? My brain says there are at least 2 or 3 others I can make compelling cases for; but my heart says of fucking course it is.