血泪交织 (1975)

Blood on the Tracks is the fifteenth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on January 20, 1975, by Columbia Records. The album marked Dylan's return to Columbia after two albums with Asylum Records. Dylan began recording the album at an A & R studio in New York City in September 1974. In December, shortly before Columbia was due to release the album, Dylan abruptly re-recorded much of the material in Sound 80 studio in Minneapolis. The final album contains five tracks recorded in New York and five from Minneapolis. The songs have been linked to tensions in Dylan's personal life, including his estrangement from his then-wife Sara. One of their children, Jakob Dylan, described the songs as "my parents talking". Dylan has denied that the songs were autobiographical.

Blood on the Tracks initially received mixed reviews, but has since been acclaimed by critics and fans as one of Dylan's best albums; various publications have listed it as one of the greatest albums of all time. It was a commercial success, peaking at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and No. 4 on the UK Albums Chart; the single "Tangled Up in Blue" peaked at No. 31 on the Billboard Hot 100. It remains one of Dylan's best-selling studio releases, with a triple-platinum certification by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for at least three million copies sold in the United States. In 2015, it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Blood on the Tracks was voted number 7 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's book All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000). In 2003, the album was ranked number 16 on Rolling Stone's list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”, rising to number 9 in the 2020 revision of the list. In 2004, it placed number 5 on Pitchfork's list of the "Top 100 Albums of the 1970s". A high-definition 5.1 surround sound edition of the album was released on SACD by Columbia in 2003.

Background and recording

After his 1974 tour with the Band, Dylan began a relationship with a Columbia Records employee, Ellen Bernstein, which Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin has described as the beginning of the end of Dylan's marriage to his wife Sara. In spring 1974, Dylan spent several weeks in New York while he took art classes from the painter Norman Raeben. Dylan credited Raeben with transforming his understanding of time, and during the summer of 1974 he began to write songs using this new knowledge in three small notebooks:

[Raeben] taught me how to see ... in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt ... when I started doing it, the first album I made was Blood on the Tracks. Everybody agrees that was pretty different, and what's different about it is there's a code in the lyrics, and also there's no sense of time.

Dylan subsequently spent time with Bernstein on his farm in Minnesota and there he completed the 17 songs from which Blood on the Tracks was formed—songs which Heylin has described as "perhaps the finest collection of love songs of the twentieth century, songs filled with the full spectrum of emotions a marriage on the rocks can engender".

Before recording the songs that would constitute Blood on the Tracks, Dylan previewed them for a number of friends in the music world, including David Crosby, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, Tim Drummond and Peter Rowan. Nash recalled that Stills disliked Dylan's private performance of his new songs; immediately after Dylan left the room, Stills remarked to Nash, "He's a good songwriter ... but he's no musician."

Initially, Dylan considered recording Blood on the Tracks with an electric backing group, and contacted Mike Bloomfield who had played lead guitar on Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited album. When the two met, Dylan ran through the songs he was planning to record, but he played them too quickly for Bloomfield to learn. Bloomfield later recalled the experience: "They all began to sound the same to me; they were all in the same key; they were all long. It was one of the strangest experiences of my life. He was sort of pissed off that I didn't pick it up." In the end, Dylan rejected the idea of recording the album with a band, and instead substituted stripped-down acoustic arrangements for all of his songs. On August 2, 1974, Dylan signed a contract with Columbia Records. After releasing his two previous albums, Planet Waves and Before the Flood, on Asylum Records, Dylan decided his new album would benefit from the commercial muscle of the record label that had made him famous, and his new contract gave him increased control over his own masters.