Tangled Up In Blue

After class I was looking over Tangled Up In Blue more. There are so, so many things to be said for this song. One thing that jumped out at me as I was reading over it again is how closely “tangled up in blue” sounds like “tangled up in YOU.” I thought that this was really interesting considering that the majority of the song is about a woman/women. In many ways the narrator seems tangled up in his remembrances of this woman/women. Using the word “you” could further group many women together, or distinguish one woman in particular. Also, substituting the word “blue” for “you” changes the meaning of the use of the word blue. Because the narrator consciously chose the word blue instead of the word you than blue must have some particular significance to the song/person/persons he is identifying in the lyrics. We talked about some of the possible implications of using the word blue, such as the emotional symbolism of the word, but I might argue that Blue could be a specific reference, maybe a sort of code name. There is no way of really telling, but it gave me something to think about. I also noticed that throughout the entire song, until the last stanza, the narrator uses he, she, and they to separate himself from the other people he is referring to in the song. In the las 2 lines however, he says “WE always did feel the same,/WE just saw it from a different point of view” At this point the narrator is directly associating himself with the people his is talking about. It seems to me that at this point perhaps he has reached some resolve. If the song is an examination of the past and the cause and effect sequences that have led him to the place he is now, than this last part could be seen as his acceptance of the past and his willingness to put the conflicts of his past (the he said she said) behind him and find a common ground.