Tangled Up in Blue

i mean it seems to be his most cleanly autobiographical , tell me more.

The flashcuts, the banked guitars, the licks and swoops of that gasping acoustic: sublime. A breakup song? Edie Sedgwick: too early?

I always assumed it was a fictional narrative, which what I always thought all the songs on Blood on the Tracks bar 'Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts' were, not knowing anything much biographical about Dylan. But basically: boy gets girl, boy and girl split up, they meet again, he decides he can't stay, and then remembering some time later boy decides to go look for girl again.

(all of Dylan's lyrics, by the way, are online at bobdylan.com, although I don't recommend looking at them without listening to the songs first, obviously. and: tangled up in blue.)

Dylan said somewhere that TUIB was his attempt to write a song that was like a painting - that wasn't tied to the flow of time..so the emotions and scenes in the song are all fractured and non-consecutive. Its one of the things I love about that song, and most of Blood on the Tracks. Idiot Wind is the same, you're never sure whether it's a historical or present-day song.

Great song. Might be my favorite by Dylan, too.

The fractured narrative is even more pronounced on the earlier version of the song on the "Bootleg" box set; it jumps between first and third person, as well as through time. Not as good musically as the officially released version, though. Didn't he start doing the lyrics in the "unreleased" way live, though?