Abstract
The paper focuses on ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, a song which underwent substantial rearrangement in Minneapolis – changing musical setting as well as lyrics, with a notable shift from third- to first-person narrative perspective. The more musically collaborative environment in Minneapolis thus brought Dylan’s work closer to the confessional poetics of Joni Mitchell’s Blue, an important influence on his album (Yaffe 2017).
And the song continued to morph onstage, as catalogued by Dylan’s archivally astute fanbase. By showing the extent to which the creative process of this solo singer-songwriter is ‘tangled up’ in a distributed cognitive network, I will suggest that the study of artistic cocreation stands to benefit from cognitive and genetic approaches.