“A lot of people tell me they enjoyed that album. It’s hard for me to relate to people enjoying that kind of pain”: What Bob Dylan said about his classic album released 50 years ago

On 20 January, 1975 - exactly 50 years ago - Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks was released.

It is widely acclaimed as one of Dylan’s greatest albums, but was it really his ‘divorce album’ as has been stated many times over the years?

Dylan had married ex-model Sara Lownds on 22 November 22, 1965. He had adopted her young daughter from a previous marriage, and in the following years they had four more children.

But by 1975, when Blood On The Tracks was released, the marriage was in crisis. The couple’s divorce would eventually be finalised on 30 June, 1977.

During a radio interview in 1975, Dylan seemed to confirm that songs from Blood On The Tracks were written about his relationship with Lownds. When the interviewer said she had enjoyed the record, Dylan replied: “A lot of people tell me they enjoyed that album. It’s hard for me to relate to people enjoying that kind of pain.”

However, a decade later, he spoke of this album in very different terms.

“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. It only seems so, like it seems that Laurence Olivier is Hamlet…”

What is certain is that Blood On The Tracks is a masterpiece. As Stephen Thomas Erlewine commented on Allmusic: “Dylan made albums more influential than this, but he never made one better.”

Bob Dylan - Tangled up in Blue (Official Audio) - YouTube

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It was also one of Dylan’s biggest hit records, reaching No. 1 in the US and No. 4 in the UK.

But the album would have been very different but for a last-minute change of heart from Dylan.

After the initial recording sessions I’m New York City in September 1974, a 10-track album was pressed and circulated to radio stations. This version of the album was scheduled for release at Christmas 1974.

But as the release date loomed Dylan ordered his record company Columbia to stop production of the album. “I thought the songs could have sounded differently, better,” Dylan said. “So I went in and re-recorded them.”

The new sessions were conducted as Sound 80 studios in Minneapolis with the best local musicians around.

As a result, the final version of Blood On The Tracks was comprised of a 50/50 split between the New York and Minneapolis sessions.

Key tracks such as Tangled Up In Blue and Idiot Wind were cut in Minneapolis. The last two tracks on the album, Shelter From The Storm and Buckets Of Rain, came from the New York sessions.

In 2020, in an update of Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time, Blood On The Tracks was placed at No.9.