Dylanology 18 (Oct 2022): What’s the Deal with “Tangled Up In Blue”?

In this issue I will explain why “Tangled Up In Blue” is Dylan’s greatest song, not just based on the lyrics, but also and most importantly: musically.

What’s the deal with “Tangled Up In Blue”?

It tops most people’s best-of-list, and rightly so. It is one of those songs that keep giving – and developing. From day 1 of its existence, the lyrics have changed. The ambiguous pronouns entered right at the start when “he” became “I” between September and December 1974; in 1978, after Dylan’s flash conversion, the lyrics are cleansed of immorality and “she” reads the Bible rather than Italian love poetry; 1984 sees a complete rewrite; the Never Ending Tour reverts to the album lyrics again, but since the early 2000s certain lyric modifications turn up here and there, and the Mondo Scripto version from 2018 is a different song once again.

Musically, the song has been fairly stable (with the exception of the complete rearrangement in 1978). For 44 years, the song was the second cousin of the Beatles’ With a Little Help from My Friends. Then, all of a sudden, in 2018, just before the pandemic and so far the last time the song was played, it became Sweet Home Alabama.

In the second part of this article, which will come in the November issue, I will discuss the transformations of the song through the years. In this text, I will concentrate on the song itself. What makes it so great?

In parallel with the text in Dylanology, I am also updating the page for “Tangled Up in Blue” on Dylanchords. As was mentioned in the interview with Ray Padgett in the previous newsletter, this was already the song with the most versions on the site. That lead is growing steadily, as new versions are added.

A Tale of Two Chords

A first step towards an answer lies in the two chords that alternate in the beginning of the song:

The versions in the clip (Sept 1974, Dec 1974, 1995, 1993, 1997, 1998, 2007, 2018, 2010, and 1984) span the song’s entire life, from the very first New York version recorded in September 1974, to what is so far the last version, from 2018. They differ in many ways, but no matter what key, style, or tempo the song is played in, that hypnotic, rocking ringing remains.

In the album version, it looks like this:

Since the song is played in A major, this means that what we have is the Tonic and the chord one whole tone below the tonic.

Excursus: Regular readers of Dylanology should be well acquainted with the system that I use for notating chord functions: T=Tonic, i.e. the key the song is in; S=Subdominant, and D=Dominant, the remaining two main harmonic functions in tonal music. For a song in A major these are A, D and E, respectively.

This is unusual, and that is why it sounds so special.

The reason why it is unusual has to do with keys and scales. “A major” is shorthand for a lot of things: that the song centres around the tones of the A major scale; that it mostly uses chords that are made up of those tones; and that it mostly operates with a certain hierarchy of chords, where the Tonic is central, and the other main chords have their fixed roles in relation to the tonic.

The A major scale and the corresponding main chords: A (Tonic), D (Subdominant), and E (Dominant).

The two most important tones in this complex are the keynote (marked in blue), and the seventh note of the scale, which is also the tone a semitone below the tonic (marked in red). It is the second most important tone because of its function as the leading-tone.

The leading-tone is a tone which “leads” to or is resolved to the tone a semitone higher or lower, because of a certain pull and a hierarchy between them. Typically, the third of the dominant leads to the keynote of the tonic. Thus, the notion of a leading-tone is almost synonymous with the dominant.

In A major the leading note is g#. But the tone that shares centre stage with the keynote a in the song, is g natural – not a half but a whole step below.

In other words: there is no leading-tone in “Tangled up in Blue”! And since leading-tone and dominant are virtually synonymous, there is no clear place for the dominant either.

And that – as Robert Frost says – makes all the difference.

Tangled up in Modes: The Mixolydian Connection

This is the time to take a step back in history – to the Renaissance, to be precise. Here’s the beginning of Orlando di Lasso’s (1532–1594) chanson Bon jour, mon cœur:

If it sounds familiar, this is why:

Orlando di Lasso meets Dylan on a summer afternoon in Dunkerque, 1992.

In the Renaissance, there was nothing strange or uncommon about this kind of progression. But with the Baroque began the Age of the Dominant, and by the time of the Classical era any cadential progression that did not involve the dominant, such as in this case, was more or less completely excluded.