1975 Bob Dylan Hit, Ranked Among 'Greatest Songs of All Time,' Took '10 Years to Live and Two Years to Write'

As Joni Mitchell once sang, “You can’t hold the hand of a rock and roll man…very long.” Like so many other rock icons, Bob Dylan‘s extracurricular activities did some major damage to his first marriage (to ex-model Sara Lownds Dylan, the inspiration for “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”). The pair’s tumultuous marriage ended after 12 years, four children, and at least one attempted reconciliation. Of course, as fans are well aware, the demise of the couple’s union, while sad, also inspired one of the most celebrated and influential albums of all time, Blood on the Tracks.

Released in 1975, “Tangled Up in Blue” was the opening song on the record, and seemed to chronicle his relationship with Sara, who was married when they first met (as the lyrics describe). During a concert in 1978, Dylan said the song took him “10 years to live and two years to write” (roughly the span of their marriage).

In an interview with Rolling Stone that same year, Dylan credited an older painter, Norman Raeben, with helping him out of the artistic slump he was in prior to Blood on the Tracks.

“I was convinced I wasn’t going to do anything else, and I had the good fortune to meet a man in New York City who taught me how to see,” Dylan explained. “He put my mind and my hand and my eye together in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt. And I didn’t know how to pull it off. I wasn’t sure it could be done in songs because I’d never written a song like that. But when I started doing it, the first album I made was Blood on the Tracks.“

As Nick Hasted of Uncut pointed out, Blood on the Tracks was like nothing Dylan had ever done before.

“‘Tangled Up in Blue’ was among a dozen songs owing little to the lysergic torrents of his twenties, or the homilies he’d settled for since,” Hasted wrote. “These were words singed by the experience of heartbreak, the 33-year-old Dylan now ruefully mature.”

Dylan himself acknowledged the evolution in his writing, noting, “what’s different about it is that there’s a code in the lyrics, and there’s also no sense of time.”

“I was trying to make it like a painting where you can see the different parts but then you also see the whole of it…the characters change from the first person to the third person, and you’re never quite sure if the third person is talking or the first person is talking,” he continued. “But if you look at the whole thing it doesn’t really matter.”

Though Dylan at one point seemed to accept the perception that his lyrics were autobiographical, by 1985, he later bristled at the idea that “Tangled Up in Blue” was based on his own life.

“Well, I read this was supposed to be about my wife,” he said. “I wish somebody would ask me first before they would go ahead and print stuff like that. Stupid and misleading jerks…anyway, it’s not the experience that counts, it’s the attitude towards the experience. I don’t write confessional songs. Emotion’s got nothing to do with it.”

Either way, he admitted that his marriage was a “failure.”

“Husband and wife was a failure, but father and mother wasn’t a failure,” he said, adding, “I wasn’t a very good husband…I don’t know what a good husband is. I figured it would last forever.”

Dylan’s marriage didn’t last forever, but his music lives on. “Tangled Up in Blue” was ranked at #67 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” And at the time of this writing, the song has 118,644,486 streams on Spotify alone.

Related: Why Bob Dylan Regrets Writing This Song: ‘I Must Have Been a Real Schmuck’