There have been contradictory reports as regards that this album is about Bob Dylan’s impending divorce from Sara. While Jacob Dylan, in a recent interview, said something along the lines of ‘When I listen to “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” I’m rocking right along with you, but when I listen to “Blood On The Tracks,” that’s about my family.” However, this attitude, and the sentiments expressed in this article, are directly contradicted by what Bob Dylan himself said in his “Biograph” notes for the song “You’re A Big Girl Now:”

“You’re A Big Girl Now well, I read that this one was suppossed to be about my wife. I wish somebody would ask me first before they go ahead and print stuff like that. I mean it couldn’t be about anybody else but my wife, right? Stupid and misleading jerks sometimes these interpreters are – I mean I’m always trying to stay one step ahead of myself and keep changing with the times, right? Like that’s my foolish mission. How many roles can I play? Fools, they limit you to their own unimaginative mentality. They never stop to think that somebody has been exposed to experiences that they haven’t been…anyway it’s not even the experience that counts, it’s the attitude towards the experience. There is so much misunderstanding by people who are caught up in their own little worlds laid on you…contrary to what some so-called experts believe, I don’t constantly ‘re-invent’ myself – I was there from the beginning. [...] I’m a mystery onl;y to those who haven’t felt the same things I have…you can’t take my stuff and verbalize it, like 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.”

Whew! Anyway, when I listen to “Blood On The Tracks,” I don’t try and focus on who he may be singing about, I am thinking about how the lyrics reveal aspects of myself. I have always identified with the subject of the song “You’re A Big Girl Now,” for instance, even though I am of the opposite gender. After going through a painful, unrequited puppy-love high-school crush with someone who had red hair in High School, rouughly a year or so after the album came out, I used to listen to the album over and over and cry over what I perceived to be the similarity in the situations. It wasn’t at all like Rimbaud and Verlaine, and there was no way I could compare all those scenes, as I was unaware of Rimbaud and Verlaine, let alone their relationship. But this is my basis for understanding this album, on an intuitive level, as someone who has felt what Bob Dylan has felt, or at least has felt what Bob Dylan has expressed. Although I have suffered break-ups that are certainly more in line with the sentiments expressed in this album since then, they are not reflected in my listening to it now. Rather, I am reminded of the girl with crimson hair across her face, and I wonder whether her hair is still red.

All of which is to say that, in order to understand what Bob Dylan’s songs are about, don’t look for any biographical information to help explain it. Don’t look without, but within. That is the key to understanding, and one need not look any further.

I wish to add that there are elements of this in the article, such as when the author expresses how she falls into the song “You’re A Big Girl Now” as easily as she falls in love, knowing the consequences. I appreciate that sentiment, and find it illuminating and informative. To say that it’s about the artist’s own affairs, however, is unwise, a distraction, and contradictory to the artist’s own words.