As I had mentioned earlier, breakup records are an important pop music tradition, and Blood on the Tracks is the archetype for the genre. The record finds Dylan in the studio without the Band for the first time in years and returning to the lyric-heavy writing of his earlier material, leading to his first 7min+ running times since Blonde on Blonde.

Thematically, the lyrics are singular in their focus; Dylan’s characters are most often I and you and she, and those characters are rarely on good terms. When they are, there’s a fragile temporality to the good times, whether in the memory hashing of Tangled Up In Blue or in the brief and jubilant You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, which sounds like a holdover from Freewheelin’. Even with a single theme, the emotional range is vast, swinging between bitersweetly nostalgic in Tangled Up In Blue and harshly insulting in the eight minute Idiot Wind, an epic of personal turmoil in the face of fame and heartbreak, turning his finger even upon himself in the closing lines. There are many nuances in the middle as well, like the calm fatalism of If You See Her Say Hello, the condescending You’re A Big Girl Now, or the romanticizing reminiscing of Shelter From The Storm. Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts is the only song that doesn’t obviously fit in with the heavy intimacy (regardless of what Dylan has said claiming the contrary) that saturates the album. But the longer the song goes on, the more it seems like the gambling, affairs, murders, and heists he sings about are more metaphors for the events in his own life than they are events in a story.

Blood on the Tracks wasn’t the first breakup album in the world, and it certainly isn’t the last, but it is probably the best. And it’s the only one written by a man whose lyricism was itself a force of nature, and this album is a hailstorm of emotional fury from a man who most often kept his distance from his songs.