Songs Whose Names Didn't Change Even Slightly #10: Bob Dylan - "Tangled Up In Blue"
A Song About Three People In Love
One of Bob Dylan's best-loved songs, Tangled Up In Blue, is nearly 40 years old and in all that time has never had a definitive set of lyrics. Year by year and even night by night, lines or vocabulary change, the narrative shifts between first and third persons, and you never quite know if it's the same narrator all the way through. The story is episodic and told in flashback, and it's never clear if the episodes are in chronological order.
There are always three people - the man who's in bed "Early one morning" at the start, the redhaired former lover he's thinking about, and her new partner. Dylan stated "This is a song about three people in love" sometimes when introducing the song on stage in 1978 - and yet some people are still convinced the narrator is talking about a different woman in each verse.
There are some constants. The very beginning and the very end don't change much, and there's always a bit where the narrator is shown a book. But which book? Originally it was probably Dante - unless you can think of another "Italian poet from the 13th Century"; but in December 1978 - at the end of a year when Dylan had been almost constantly on the road - it suddenly changed to the bible. With characteristically brilliant hindsight, people like to surmise that this was a coded signal of Dylan's new interest in Christianity, revealed a year or two later. But one of the bible verses he mentions (Jeremiah Ch17 V33) fits the rhyme scheme fine but doesn't actually exist; so who knows. And is it significant or not that the woman who shows him it is sporting "a dress made out of stars and stripes" (for the only time, it seems)?
At the end, there's a presumably-key passage that's always there - in the album version it's "We always did feel the same / We just saw it from a different point of view." The "point" always rhymes with "joint" - usually he's on the road and looking for one, but last Saturday in Blackpool he said he was "still on the road / Tryin' to stay out of the joint." And the woman who shows him poems brushed some dust off the stove - as far as I know, that's the first time in 40 years. Must've been pretty dusty.