Amanda Petrusich, reviewing
Rough and Rowdy Ways in the
New Yorker, has cited the song as her favorite on the album. She characterizes it as a "gentle ballad about deliberately resigning oneself to love and its demands" and notes that, while it's "not the album's richest or most complicated song", its "evocation of a certain kind of golden-hour melancholy" makes it eminently re-listenable. In an essay on
Rough and Rowdy Ways in his book
Outtakes on Bob Dylan,
Michael Gray also named "I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You" as his favorite song on the album. He credits Dylan's vocal for the way it "holds so wide a range of feeling across the song" and the lyrics for "such sweet, acute, specific touches" as the way Dylan juxtaposes the phrase "I'm sittin' on my terrace" (the word "terrace", Gray notes, "enfolds terra, as in terra firma") with "lost in the stars" in the opening line.
Spectrum Culture included the song on a list of "Bob Dylan's 20 Best Songs of the '10s and Beyond". In an article accompanying the list, critic Jacob Nierenberg described the song thusly: "Waltzing and hymnlike, it sounds closer to the pop standards that Dylan spent much of this decade putting his spin on than it does his usual brew of blues and folk; the backing vocals are intimate and deeply affecting, as are Dylan’s own, so much so that it feels like he’s holding the very person he’s singing to in his arms. When he croons 'I’ll lay down beside you when everyone’s gone'
, it might be the most unguarded and romantic thing he’s sung since '
Sara'”. Drew Warrick, writing about the track in
The Michigan Daily, claims that Dylan "hasn't sounded this sharp in decades", calling his vocal "a cavernous croon that soars with genuine affection" and noting that Dylan's "
Sinatra phase", in which he spent years singing
traditional pop standards live and in the studio, had "paid off". A staff reviewer at
Mojo agreed, describing the song as "gorgeous" and praising "the vulnerable lead vocal" for being "a refutation of the myth that [Dylan] can no longer nail pure melody".
The Fiery Furnaces singer
Eleanor Friedberger cited it as her favorite Dylan song in a 2021
Guardian article in which she wrote, "Dylan writes super-beautiful, romantic love songs. This one is a travelling song, and he does something that I’ve stolen and mentions specific place names, which makes it real and relatable. We don’t think of Dylan as vulnerable, but he lays himself on the line. He’s world-weary, and his delivery is so languid as he stretches out the words. He was almost 80, and made an album just as great as the ones he made decades ago".
NJArts critic Jay Lustig identified it as his favorite song on
Rough and Rowdy Ways, calling it one of Dylan's "loveliest love songs". A 2021 article at
Inside of Knoxville listed it as one of the "25 Best Dylan Songs from the Last 25 Years". Actress/singer
Rita Wilson included the song on a
Spotify playlist of her favorite romantic Bob Dylan songs when promoting her single "I Wanna Kiss Bob Dylan". == Cultural references ==