Cover of Blood on the Tracks (1975) by Bob Dylan and The Tortured Poets Department by Taylor Swift … [+]
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a generational icon singer-songwriter who has not performed live in a while headlines a blowout stadium tour, giving shows that sum up the various “eras” of their career, from their earliest days as a precocious young newcomer, through their triumphant crossover into pop, to their more narrative recent work. The artist inspires a following of fans that pore over their lyrics with the intensity of Talmudic scholars, attempting to unravel deep mysteries and inside jokes. The artist is romantically linked with a long list of glamourous film stars, models and musicians, especially now that a long-term relationship appears to have ended. Though they guard their private life jealously, their every public move and appearance makes news.
When the artist’s long-anticipated new album appears, it avoids the flashy pyrotechnics of their best-known work in favor of a set of low-key midtempo songs that detail doomed relationships, casual encounters with inappropriate lovers, bitter breakups and tearful goodbyes. At moments, the artist lashes out lyrically against the expectations of fans and the often idiotic discourse that surrounds them in the media. And it is an immediate sensation.
If that sounds vaguely familiar, then you are probably even older than I am, because I am talking about Bob Dylan in early 1975, then age 34, on the eve of his fifteenth studio album, Blood on the Tracks. Dylan packed stadiums during his 1974 shows with the Band, featuring electrifying performances of the best-known songs from his folk, electric, country and singer-songwriter eras. Blood on the Tracks, known to casual fans as “the one with ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ on it,” brought a new depth and maturity to Dylan’s work while consolidating his strengths as a lyricist and songwriter. It was also shot through with the pain that apparently came from his personal life during this time. The result was the most intimate record of Dylan’s career.
1974: Bob Dylan plays a Fender Telecaster electric guitar on stage in 1974. (Photo by Michael Ochs … [+]
I had this album playing in my car as I drove to visit a couple of hardcore Swiftie friends to listen to 34 year-old Taylor Swift’s eleventh official album, The Tortured Poets Department, over the weekend. I’m relatively new to Swift’s work but have come to admire it. The glittering Millennial Swift draws only occasional comparisons to dusty Boomer icon Dylan for obvious reasons: their aesthetics, influences, audiences, and relationship to musical history could scarcely be more different. Same with the cultures and politics that form the backdrop to their careers. Swift’s outspoken feminism has changed the culture. Dylan emerged before feminism, and it sometimes shows. But to me, the congruencies between Tortured Poets and Blood bring their similarities into greater focus.
Like Taylor Swift, Bob Dylan began his professional career extremely young: 20 in his case, 16 in hers. They both began working in genres with strong boundaries and conventions (acoustic folk and Nashville-style country), exhibiting early facility with songwriting combined with a singular focus and ambition. Both made controversial moves toward pop music in a bid to broaden their audience. Dylan was famously booed performing with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He seemed to shake it off.
Both hungered for critical and commercial success. Dylan got there quicker, in part because, as Swift might point out, he was not judged as negatively for the bratty behavior of a young superstar due to his gender. But even on his best day, Dylan never enjoyed Swift’s instant and sustained chart domination or sales numbers, despite having his career heyday during a much simpler and straightforward period of the music industry. Swift had her first #1 single at age 16, Dylan at age 79. Blood on the Tracks hit #1 on the album charts when it came out, but it did not set any sales records.
Most of Dylan’s early notoriety came from the topical subjects of songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times, They Are A-Changin’,” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” which reflected the anxieties of an American culture roiled by the atomic threat of the Cold War and the rising Civil Rights movement. Swift only rarely, and very obliquely, tackles this kind of subject matter. Her politics are of the more personal variety, at least in her music.
But from the beginning, Dylan was also the innovator of the kind of bitter romantic kiss-off songs that are Swift’s stock in trade. In 1962, 21 year old Dylan penned the ur-text of all modern breakup songs, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” Whichever unfortunate lover wasted the narrator’s precious time, it is pretty clear they were never, ever getting back together. Even to this day, Dylan can write a pretty mean breakup song when he sets his mind to it, and on Blood on the Tracks, where lost love is the main theme, his pen was the sharpest it has ever been.
Both artists at age 34 demonstrate more experience with love, loss and heartbreak than in their growing-up-in-public wild years, writing with more insight, if not empathy, into their doomed romantic scenarios. This is especially important in Dylan’s case, as finger-pointing breakup songs coming from a woman can sound empowering, but coming from a man can sound abusive. Whatever his earlier tendencies in that direction, Dylan’s female characters in Blood on the Tracks have considerably more agency and dimension.
Both artists, as huge celebrities, were objects of desire, but also subjects with their own appetites and emotions, and reflect that in the attitudes of their narrators. And both seem determined, at the height of their fame, to expose themselves at their most raw and vulnerable, as if to say that even being at the top of the world is no defense against a broken heart. Swift, of course, has built her career on this kind of approachability; we are encouraged to believe every song is about her life. For Dylan, who has almost never let us see behind his mask, it was as close as he ever got to intimacy with his listeners.
So, despite the profound stylistic differences between Taylor Swift and Bob Dylan, this moment is where the congruencies in their career converge. On Blood on the Tracks, Dylan is spare, painting his masterpiece in 10 deft strokes. On The Tortured Poets Department, Swift is expansive: the extended “Anthology” version contains 31 intense tracks. Each record bristles with lines that make you lean forward and marvel, slack-jawed, at the pure poetic virtuosity. And there are times when the two albums almost feel in conversation with each other.
Blood on the Tracks opens with “Tangled Up in Blue,” an inventory of relationships that failed for different reasons (“papa’s bankbook wasn’t big enough,” “I helped her out of a jam, I guess, but I used a little too much force,” “something inside of him died.”) Swift gives each one of these types of stories its own track, surgically dissecting “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” the lover who caused her to say goodbye to London (“sacrificed to the gods of your bluest days”), and the fun-for-a-minute love interest in “Fortnight” (“run into you sometimes, comment on my sweater”).
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE – SEPTEMBER 20: NSAI Songwriter-Artist of the Decade honoree, Taylor Swift … [+]
Sometimes, each songwriter’s protagonist shows up as the antagonist on the other’s album. “I can change, I swear, oh see what you can do” moans the narrator of Dylan’s bittersweet kiss-off “She’s a Big Girl Now,” to the lover who has outgrown his antics. In Swift’s “I Can Fix Him (Really I Can),” her narrator finally concludes that maybe she can’t. It is easy to picture these two characters, separated by half a century, glowering at each other as the door closes on their relationship.
Here’s Lily, the cabaret singer femme fatale in Dylan’s western noir shaggy dog story “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” who falls for the bad boy “Jack of Hearts” even when she should know better:
“Lily was a princess, she was fair-skinned and precious as a child/ She did whatever she had to do, she had that certain flash every time she smiled She had come away from a broken home, had lots of strange affairs/ With men in every walk of life which took her everywhere/But she’d never met anyone quite like the Jack of Hearts”
Outside of the line about coming from a broken home, this could describe any number of Swift’s worldly female doppelgangers who get fascinated by dangerous men precisely because they are dangerous and unpredictable.
One of Dylan’s most poignant songs, “If You See Her, Say Hello,” almost seems written from the vantage point of Swift’s discarded suitor from “The Tortured Poets Department,” reflecting on his side of the experience. “If you get close to her, kiss her once for me,” he sings. “Always have respected her for doing what she did and gettin’ free/ Oh, whatever makes her happy, I won’t stand in the way/ Though the bitter taste still lingers on from the night I tried to make her stay.”
Then we come to the snarling centerpiece of Blood on the Tracks, “Idiot Wind,” Dylan’s howl of anguish at the stupidity of the discourse that surrounded his every move. The song begins with the couplet “Someone’s got it in for me/they’re planting stories in the press” and continues:
“People see me all the time/ And they just can’t remember how to act/ Their minds are filled with big ideas/ Images and distorted facts/ Even you, yesterday /You had to ask me where it was at / I couldn’t believe after all these years/ You didn’t know me any better than that”
It’s a sentiment that Swift seems to relate to. In “But Daddy I Love Him,” the snarling centerpiece (at least of the initial 15 tracks) of Poets, we get this controversial rebuke of her own fans:
“I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing/ God save the most judgmental creeps/ Who say they want what’s best for me/ Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see”
In the title track of The Tortured Poets Department, Swift is pretty clear that “you’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith, this ain’t the Chelsea Hotel” [Bob Dylan’s digs for a bit of the mid-60s.] And I’m not an idiot. I think we can take her at her word: she’s her own artist with her own voice, writing in current day vernacular about her specific perceptions and experiences. Any allusions to her illustrious, pop musician-turned-Nobel laureate forebear in a collection that clearly ups the ante on her skills as a poet, are surely coincidental.
But Swift is at least as canny and ambitious as Dylan, and she wields the crafts of composition, collaboration and studio production in service of her art much more skillfully than Dylan has ever done. Releasing a perfectly realized collection that resonates, intentionally or not, with one of the greatest singer-songwriter albums of the past half century doesn’t hurt her case for transcending her pop star image.
What does any of this mean for Swift’s development as an artist as she turns the same corner that Dylan did? In hindsight, Blood on the Tracks, which seemed to be a creative renaissance, was more of an end than a beginning. Dylan seemed to lose his way, and his cultural relevance, for the rest of the 1970s and most of the 1980s. In the latter half of his career, comprising the entirety of Taylor Swift’s life, he has loomed as a shadowy eminence, mining the back roads of “Old, Weird America” for albums full of gorgeous, well-crafted, often critically-acclaimed songs, while filling mid-sized halls for performances on his “never-ending tour.” Though his songwriting skills are barely diminished into his mid-80s, neither his work nor his persona have ever regained the total command of America’s attention that they enjoyed last in the mid-1970s.
As we’re living through the era of Maximum Taylor Swift, it’s hard to imagine her fading imperceptibly into the role of venerated elder, a la Dylan or Joni Mitchell, even as she ages out of being the larger-than-life Anti-Hero. Maybe The Tortured Poets Department brings her audience further along her personal and artistic journey. The sheer volume of it suggests Swift still has fuel to burn, if she can avoid becoming tangled up in blue.
