Blood On The Tracks - Bob Dylan (1975)

You knew I wasn’t going to go too long without another Dylan record. Last one for a while I think.

By 1974, Dylan’s endless chameleon act had gone through folk singer, rock star, country troubador, and then back to rock star by touring and recording with The Band again.

Never one to sit still, he wrote a set of songs examining–sometimes tenderly, sometimes bitterly–his cracking marriage and the pressures he’d been under in other ways.

He recorded the tracks in NYC in September, handed the record off to Columbia records (he’d returned to Columbia after briefly releasing further material with The Band on Asylum).

Then, just before release, he changed his mind and assembled a different band in Minneapolis to re-record many of the tracks, often radically changed. The final version of the album that was released was a mix of the two sessions, 5 tracks from each.

One of the Bootleg Series releases contains both sessions if you’d like to compare and contrast.

If anyone doubted Dylan’s creativity as he got older, this put a lot of that talk to rest. These are brilliant, far-reaching songs that have proven timeless.

Tangled Up In Blue was one that changed particularly, going through several versions just in these sessions. He’d never really stop tweaking the lyrics, still adding and rearranging verses while performing decades later like he was just about done with it.

Shelter From The Storm is a personal favorite of mine, as is Simple Twist of Fate.

This was a pretty typically Dylan-sounding record of countrified folk rock, but these songs would also form the backbone of the next big transformation in the coming Rolling Thunder era. OK, so maybe I still have one more Dylan record coming.