Blood on the Tracks is the fifteenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on January 20, 1975,[3][4] by Columbia Records.

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.

It remains one of Dylan's best-selling studio releases, with a double-platinum certification by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for at least two million copies sold in the United States.

[8] Blood on the Tracks was voted number 7 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's book All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000).

[13] Dylan subsequently gave Raeben credit in interviews for transforming his understanding of time, and during the summer of 1974 Dylan began to write a series of songs in a series of three small notebooks[14] which used his new knowledge: [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.

[15] 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.

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.

"[20] Eric Weissberg and his band, Deliverance, originally recruited as session men, were rejected after two days of recording because they could not keep up with Dylan's pace.

[18] After ten days[18] and four sessions[21] with the current lineup, Dylan had finished recording and mixing, and, by November, had cut a test pressing of the album.

Robert Christgau also heard the early version of the album and called it "a sellout to the memory of Dylan's pre-electric period".

[23] At his brother's urging, Dylan agreed to re-record five of the album's songs in Sound 80 in Minneapolis, with backing musicians recruited by David.

An alternate take of the song "Shelter from the Storm" is featured in the original soundtrack album for Jerry Maguire (1996).

[27] Despite featuring multiple versions of nearly every song from the sessions, the actual mix of "Idiot Wind" found on the test pressing is not in the box set, and was only made available on the aforementioned 2019 reissue.

"[30] Dylan has denied this autobiographical interpretation, stating in a 1985 interview with Bill Flanagan, "A lot of people thought that album pertained to me.

[33] In "Hot Press," writing about the three known lyric notebooks for the songs, Anne Margaret Daniel noted that "Simple Twist of Fate" was first entitled "Snowbound," and set in part, like "Tangled Up In Blue," in a New York City apartment.

"[46] In NME, Nick Kent described "the accompaniments [as] often so trashy they sound like mere practice takes",[46] while Crawdaddy magazine's Jim Cusimano found the instrumentation incompetent.

Gray argued that it transformed the cultural perception of Dylan, and that he was no longer defined as "the major artist of the sixties.

"[47] In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau wrote that although the lyrics occasionally evoke romantic naiveté and bitterness, Blood on the Tracks is altogether Dylan's "most mature and assured record".

[45] In Salon.com, Wyman wrote: "Blood on the Tracks is his only flawless album and his best produced; the songs, each of them, are constructed in disciplined fashion.

It is his kindest album and most dismayed, and seems in hindsight to have achieved a sublime balance between the logorrhea-plagued excesses of his mid-1960s output and the self-consciously simple compositions of his post-accident years.

[50] Novelist Rick Moody called it "the truest, most honest account of a love affair from tip to stern ever put down on magnetic tape".

[52][53] According to music journalist Rob Sheffield, Blood on the Tracks became a benchmark album for Dylan in the years that followed because it was "such a stunning comeback".

[54] Hip hop group Public Enemy reference it in their 2007 Dylan tribute song "Long and Whining Road": "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back / You bet there's blood on them Bomb Squad tracks".