“You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” by Bob Dylan

"You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" sits fifth on Blood on the Tracks, the Bob Dylan album that reached the stores in January 1975, and it was cut in September 1974 with Phil Ramone engineering and producing. It's a lean, springy little thing: Dylan's acoustic guitar and harmonica out front, Tony Brown's bass underneath and Buddy Cage's steel guitar sighing around the edges, a love song that already seems to know how it ends.

Whose love, though, is the parlor game. Plenty of listeners hear the separation from his wife in it; Ellen Bernstein, who was seeing Dylan in 1974 while he and his wife were apart, has said it's about her. Dylan himself pointed at books instead, remarking in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One that he could build an entire record out of Chekhov stories and let the critics read it as autobiography if they liked.

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