In 1975, Bob Dylan made the album he’d always wanted to make: “That was a breakthrough for me”

Bob Dylan described *Blood on the Tracks*, released in 1975, as a breakthrough because it let him write in a way he had long wanted to explore. The album marked a fresh stage in his songwriting after he had moved away from the folk and rock styles that first made him famous.

Recorded initially in New York in September 1974, the album was made during a period of strain in Dylan’s marriage, though he rejected the idea that its songs were autobiographical. Tracks such as ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ shift between characters and points in time; Dylan later rerecorded five songs in Minnesota, changing the sound of the finished record. Its emotional range runs from the anger of ‘Idiot Wind’ to the tenderness of ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’.