"I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You" is a song written and performed by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and released as the fourth track on his 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways.
[3] (Offenbach's famous barcarolle has also served as the inspiration for other popular songs including "Tonight is So Right For Love", which Elvis Presley sang in the 1960 film G.I.
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.
[20] 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.
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.
[23] 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".
[30] "I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You" received its live debut at the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on November 2, 2021, the first concert of Dylan's Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour.