eMusic Review
"Love is so simple, to quote a phrase," Dylan snaps. But breakups aren't so simple, and there's no other record that captures the blinding, complicated pain of a dissolving relationship like this. Full of rage and longing and knotty memories, these are mutable songs — they're a matched set (all of them were written in the same open tuning, and half of them end each verse with a refrain), but he famously rewrote and re-recorded half of them with a pick-up band a few weeks before the album came out. "Tangled Up in Blue," a strong candidate for his greatest song, kept changing shape in concert for decades, sometimes with new lyrics and sometimes simply by virtue of what words Dylan emphasized in each performance. The deeper you go into the emotional labyrinths of these prismatic narratives and aching, painterly observations, the deeper they get. Sometimes their insights are direct, as in "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," a perfect love song with a permanent leavetaking built into it; sometimes they're oblique, as in "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," a nine-minute Western drama about a sacrifice for love. And sometimes they take the form of naked,… read more »
