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"More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 14" is the 14th release from Dylan's Bootleg series features a six-disc deluxe box set that collects tracks from the six sessions in New York and Minneapolis in 1974 for 1975's Blood On The Tracks. Released Nov 2, 2018 on the Legacy label.
At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 94, based on 5 reviews, indicating "Universal acclaim ".
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None of Bob Dylan’s albums had a more confounding genesis than “Blood on the Tracks.” Dylan entered New York’s A&R Studios on Sept. 16, 1974, in possession of the strongest batch of songs he’d written since the mid-’60s. They were stories of dislocation and parting, of brokenness and the search for a lost connection. They managed the trick of being both intimately detailed and universal. Were they rooted in Dylan’s own deteriorating marriage? “I don’t write confessional songs,” Dylan sneered when asked about the album in an interview a decade later. Yet the most emotionally charged songs seem too raw to have been drawn from anything except real life.
The six-CD set collects the entire output of that four-day stretch of recording in New York. Inevitably, there’s some repetition — no fewer than 12 different attempts at “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” for example. What’s exhilarating is the chance to eavesdrop on the evolution of the songs as Dylan grasps, bit by bit, for the emotional center of each one — changing lyrics in “Tangled Up in Blue,” altering his vocal delivery to make “Idiot Wind” more melancholy or sardonic. You sense his frustration as the band makes “Simple Twist of Fate” into slick AM radio fodder and “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome” a jaunty two-step.
What the set does best is to capture, in all its messy inclusivity, the sheer force of Dylan’s inspiration, even as he struggles to figure out how to convert it into recorded sound. After years of seclusion and mediocre albums, he was about to reinvent songwriting again, and he was betting, as he had before, that if he simply got into the studio and started to try things, it would come out right. On some solo tracks, apparently cut before the band arrived, you can clearly hear the buttons on Dylan’s jacket hitting his guitar. No one stopped him; everyone thought it best to just let the tape roll.
Reviewed by David Weininger for bostonglobe.com.
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