#tangled up in blue

[victormalonso]

tangled up in blue | victor m. alonso

[rastronomicals]

9:46 AM EDT July 18, 2024:

Bob Dylan - "Tangled Up In Blue" From the album Blood on the Tracks (October 12, 2007)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

★★★★

[onemorecupofcoffee]

“on the road” by jack kerouac // “tangled up in blue” by bob dylan

[bobdylan-n-jonimitchell]

Bob Dylan “Tangled Up In Blue” Wembley Arena, July 1984—Real Live, November 29, 1984.

[myimaginaryradio]

Tangled Up In Blue - Bob Dylan

[omgmusic]

The Indigo Girls - Tangled Up In Blue

[jt1674]

[pisswizrd]

We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view

Tangled up in blue

[hauntedgardenking]

“Early one morning the sun was shining

I was lying in bed

Wondering if she’d changed at all

If her hair was still red”

[dollarbin]

Sandy Saturday #15:

The Sea Captain

Some songs birth worlds. Tangled Up in Blue, Famous Blue Rain Coat, The Diamond Sea, The Bells, Will To Love: sure, they appear on albums alongside other tracks, but really they serve as their very own beginning, middle and end. Unique characters arise alongside the riffs; otherwise untouchable landscapes are established within the beats.

Our attention is altogether seized when a song births a new world. There's no topless bar out there where the staff are currently standing by, ready to bend down and tie the laces of your shoe. But you can go to such a place anyway, right now, by simply dropping the needle on Dylan and letting him unfold such a space for you.

The Sea Captain, a humble, understated and self-penned track from Sandy Denny's second solo record, may seem like an unlikely choice for such distinction. But hear me out.

First, let's let Sandy tell her story:

At first we are in familiar territory for anyone who's ever listened to Liege and Leif (if you are sitting around reading this and you have not listened to Liege and Leif that is really, really weird): Sandy embodies not the titular captain but instead a deserter who takes to the sea to escape their troubles. They may be fleeing war; they may be fleeing their own family or past crimes. We don't know what they're running from, but we're instantly on their side: after all, they sing with Sandy Denny's voice.

But something weird is going on. Simply, put I'm not altogether sure that the deserter, our narrator, is human. They "fly" from the shore; later, when the ship catches fire, they once again "fly" away from it. Is it a bird? A storyteller? A ghost?

Denny switches perspectives in the final, equally elusive, verse to observe, rather than embody, the deserter as he passes by not just the boat, but also the song itself: he's gone and we cannot go with him because we, like the Sea Captain, cannot take to the air and fly.

Or, something? Likely, I've got all of it wrong. But I don't know if Sandy herself knew what she was writing; it's a poem, not a math problem.

Even so, the more I think about Denny's graceful, dense and obscure lyrics the more I remember reading an incredible piece years and years ago about another world building song, Geeshie Wiley's Last Kind Word Blues: the author is some kind of genius, and he goes on and on and on about the song, about Wiley and about the meaning of life. Imagine Greil Marcus, only with an editor and a fact checker: incredible depths.

Meanwhile, The Sea Captain is the perfect compliment to Ian Matthews' Please Be My Friend, which we featured a few days back, in that both songs present the young and aspiring Richard Thompson in the best possible light. I encourage you to listen to the track again; only this time just listen for Richard: he creeps in early, under Sandy's second verse, steps up to offer his solo, then cradles her tenderly for the rest of the track.

Thompson has called his solo on this piece one of the best in his career, and I concur. It's so quiet, so delicate; maybe the deserter dies in the ship's fire within this song, and that's how he is able to pass by the boat and fly his soul onward, leaving everything behind; if so, Thompson's solo is the sound death.

And if that's what death sounds like, wow: we have absolutely nothing to fear.

[fizzy-watches-and-listens]

GUYS I LOVE BOB DYLAN

i could actually cry

tangled up in blue just started playing and i nearly screamed

[victormalonso]

Tangled Up In Blue · Bob Dylan

[rastronomicals]

11:31 AM EST December 17, 2023:

Bob Dylan - "Tangled Up In Blue" From the album Blood on the Tracks (October 12, 2007)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

★★★★

[onemorecupofcoffee]

i feel like a little girl screaming and kicking my feet listening to this song

[endreal]

Tangled Up In Blue, covered live by Indigo Girls

[manibolly]

Bob Dylan - Tangled up in Blue (Official Audio)

For Bob Dylan's 82 birthday and for how I feel about the passing of my friend Helmut Berger.