“Always changing” is the product of the LP’s sense of no-time. Speaking to Mary Travers on April 26, 1975, Dylan commented upon the concept of time, the point he tried to make being not only that “the past, the present and the future all exists”, but that “it’s all the same” — something learned from Norman, Dylan told Jonathan Cott, who used to teach that:
You’ve got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room, and there’s very little that you can’t imagine happening.
Dylan’s assertion to Malt Damsker that he didn’t perform the songs on Blood On The Tracks particularly well may be surprising but, he went on, “they can be changed... “. In fact, Dylan has continually reworked the songs, changing the lyrics again and again in such songs as “Simple Twist Of Fate” and “Tangled Up In Blue”. Dylan ties up ideas of time and change to the idea of song-as-painting with specific reference to “Tangled Up In Blue” on the jacket notes to Biograph, where he says of the song:
I was just trying to make it like a painting where you can see the different parts but then you also see the whole of it. With that particular song, that’s what I was trying to do... with the concept of time, and the way the characters change from the first person to the third person, and you’re never quite sure if the third person is talking or the first person is talking. But as you look at the whole thing, it really doesn’t matter.
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