Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks often gets labeled as an album that details a breakup in all its drama and angst. While there’s no doubt that the LP depicts an especially dark night of the romantic soul at times, it’s not as one-dimensional as all that.
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For example, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” is a positively cheerful look at a relationship that has run its course. Perhaps the reason that it stands out is that it was likely about a different relationship than the one at the heart of most of the album’s songs.
Spilling ‘Blood’
You will find no instance of Bob Dylan confessing that Blood On The Tracks was indeed a blow-by-blow of the deterioration of his marriage to his first wife, Sara. The fact that the couple actually stayed married a few years after the album was released suggests that it’s perhaps too pat to call it “the divorce album.”
What we can say for sure is that the LP features several songs where narrators are either bemoaning a relationship that’s about to end or ruefully looking back after it’s all over. Regardless of the topics, the album found Dylan operating at a level of lyricism that he hadn’t attempted since the mid-60s.
The consensus among Dylan’s biographers is that 1974, which is when he composed much of the material for Blood On The Tracks, was a rocky time in his marriage. He and Sara were apart from each other for long stretches, during which time he allegedly became involved with other women.
High and “Lonesome”
“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” separates from the other breakup songs on Blood On The Tracks in terms of its tone. It’s cordial and even sentimental in the face of a love affair that’s about to expire, not because of animosity, but out of necessity. Most Bob Dylan scholars believe that the song refers to one of the trysts that the artist had during that period and not to his marriage.
“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” is intriguing because of how the narrator is anticipating his reaction to the end of a relationship even while he’s still in the middle of it. It’s a kind of fatalistic approach to romance. But the song’s lyrics make clear just how much this woman means to the narrator.
“I’ve seen love go by my door,” he begins. “Never been this close before.” This is in contrast to his past relationships. “I’ve only known careless love,” he admits. “This time around it’s more correct/Right on target, so direct.”
Examining the Lyrics of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”
Interspersed among these personal reflections are descriptions of his surroundings. It’s as if the wonder of this love is coloring everything around him. In one of the middle eights, for example, he notes the flowers, the crickets, and the river before coming back to the girl: “I could stay with you forever and never realize the time.”
Dylan later brings up the high-drama relationship between the French poets Verlaine and Rimbaud as a way of describing his own past affairs. This new one ends with as much sweetness as sadness. “But I’ll see you in the sky above,” he sings. “In the tall grass, in the ones I love/You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go.”
The song represents one of Bob Dylan’s most heartfelt love songs ever, right in the middle of an album full of pain and anguish about matters of the heart. Perhaps the affair described in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” offered the same kind of respite in the artist’s life.
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