It was prominently featured during the Bob Dylan and The Band 1974 Tour and a live version from the subsequent album Before the Flood was issued as a single and reached number 66 on the US chart.

[7] The track features Dylan singing and playing harmonica, with members of the A-Team of studio musicians that had been engaged for the album sessions, including Charlie McCoy on trumpet, Hargus "Pig" Robbins on piano, Kenny Buttrey on drums, and guitarists Joe South, and Wayne Moss, alongside Kooper on organ and Robertson on guitar.

[13] Following what the critic Andy Gill summarises as a "quirky, nonsensical middle-eight concerning a badly-built, stilt-walking judge",[14] the final verse establishes that the woman has been unfaithful to the narrator, as he suspected.

[18][19] Ben Beaumont-Thomas of The Guardian described "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine" as "a breakup song whose narrator can't deal with the unpredictability and lack of commitment from their partner".

[24] The musicianship was praised by the San Francisco Examiner critic Ralph Gleason, who called it a "wildly swinging track",[25] and by Oliver Trager, who regarded it as "one of Dylan's most infectious stompers".

[11] Neil Spencer, who noted that a version of the title appears in the lyrics of Buddy Holly's recording of "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" (1958), gave the song a rating of 5/5 stars in an Uncut magazine Dylan supplement in 2015.

[32] The reviewer for Cash Box wrote that it was a "natural rocker done up in heavier, contemporary style" and that the musicians provided excellent backing for Dylan's powerful singing.

[34] Tim Riley called the song as performed on the tour Dylan's "most dramatic antilove letter to his audience, the number that flaunts his self-assurance even as it vents injury".

[37] Similarly, John Nogowski commented that the live performance was harder and more uptempo than the album track, with Dylan's voice "aggressive, filled with exclamation points".

[2][39] In a review of the performance at the New Theatre Oxford on November 4, Nick Hasted of Uncut commented that Dylan's delivery left a "comically canyon-wide" pause between the two phrases in the song's title.

Dave Marsh felt that her version was "at best competent", and might have been improved but for her producer David Rubinson whose "notion of funk remains as stiff and fey as ever".

[46] In the Los Angeles Times, Don Snowden also criticized the album's production, and that the track, "given the formula funk treatment", suffered from a "highly cliched musical approach".

[51] Smith felt that the original had "a great rhythmic backbeat ... [and] a timeless, universal lyric", and predicted that the remix would "confound people's expectations of Bob, which he has done throughout his career".

"[55] Several reviewers, including Joe Levy for Rolling Stone, John Mulvey of Uncut, and David Williamson of the Western Daily Mail were pleasantly surprised by how much they enjoyed the remixed track.