Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan once introduced this album's opening song, "Tangled Up in Blue," onstage as taking him ten years to live and two years to write. It was, for him, a pointed reference to the personal crisis -- the collapse of his marriage to Sara Lowndes -- that at least partly inspired this album, Dylan's best of the 1970s. In fact, he wrote all of these lyrically piercing, majestic folk-pop songs in two months, in mid-1974 originally cutting them in September, in just a week with members of the bluegrass band Deliverance. But in December, Dylan played the record for his brother David in Minneapolis, who suggested recutting some songs with local musicians. The final version was a mix of New York and Minneapolis tapes; Dylanologists still debate the merits of the two sessions. Yet no one disputes the album's luxuriant tangle of guitars, the gritty directness in Dylan's voice and the magnificent confessional force of his writing, including the sharp-tongued opprobrium of "Idiot Wind," his greatest put-down song since "Like a Rolling Stone."
