The meet-cute was thwarted by the cowboy hat.

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[6.36]

Edward Okulicz: Wow, what do you know? Someone found the sweet spot between “Everybody Knows” and folk-country, and it was just as good as it should be.
[8]

Brad Shoup: I enjoy songs that unfurl with the intricacy and steadiness of clock mechanics. There are a bunch of great details in this one both lyrical and musical, like a couple tiny scalar runs from David Rawlings. “The Way It Goes” is kin to “People Who Died,” but the latter’s shambolic black refrain is swapped out for a gnomic couplet: “That’s the way that it goes/Everybody’s buying little baby clothes”. Fucking heartbreaking.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Welch is a smart folkie, which makes her a potential menace. But here the fatalism that is the smart folkie’s stock in trade is well-observed and above all tuneful; she’s even smart enough to invest the line “everybody’s buyin’ little baby clothes” with a rue that shades into irony with subsequent listens. Play this before or after Beyonce’s “Best Thing I Never Had” and marvel at the comity between rural and urban America.
[7]

Martin Skidmore: Pleasant enough Americana, with likeable playing, but I soon got tired of her singing “that’s the way that it goes” after fairly blank statements. I could listen to the music happily much longer than I could her slightly droney vocal.
[4]

Rebecca Toennessen: Gillian’s understated croon is smooth, but with chunks of broody emotion, like chunky peanut butter. This song is restrained and sweet, and so tastily melancholy. 
[9]

Anthony Easton: Welch is polite NPR bait, and has become more so — I cannot imagine as anything as smart as “Elvis Presley Blues” or “Miss Ohio” coming out of her working life any more. That seems to be dismissive, and she isn’t Alison Krauss at this point, so there is some hope. That said, one of the things for which she’s underrated is her ability to construct a hook. The writing on this is well done, and the singing beautiful, but she hangs it on this shiny-shiny chorus-laden hook — as shiny as anything else in pop, a hook that cannot be roughed up into full gentility.
[8]

Jonathan Bogart: Am I crazy, or is this supposed to be a sequel to Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe”? If so, it’s the kind of fanficky sequel that wants to spell out all the ambiguity and make the gender roles anachronistically more equitable; which ends up working because Welch approaches it from a different oblique angle, with plenty of her own ambiguity. She doesn’t have Gentry’s give-nothing-away poker voice, but she’s a better actress, and it turns out more of a remake, the rare good kind that sheds a new light on a familiar set of signifiers.
[7]

Ian Mathers: I have a fair amount of affection for Welch’s style, but the lyrics here seem at once both oddly specific (the baby clothes, the repeated mention of past friendships) and kind of formless. “That” may indeed be the way it goes, but I leave the song no more aware of what “that” is than I had when I came in.
[6]

Michaela Drapes: There’s a reason timeless traditional ballads are, well, timeless. This song aspires to that end, but doesn’t get far down the road. For all the pathos of Welch’s voice, the odd chorus doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the story. Is she the last of the ne’er-do-wells, all the rest are dead or settled down? If so, the endless litany of others’ sins doesn’t give anyone much reason to care about what happened to them (or her) either way.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: How devastating would this be if Kathleen Edwards or Lucinda Williams had sung it? Gillian has the flat affect of someone scrolling through Facebook updates, suicides and new babies and alcoholism and moving just more fleeting statuses. This needs storytelling, but the telling’s not there.
[4]

Jer Fairall: I want to like this just like I always think I’m gonna like Gillian Welch whenever I encounter her in the form of Emmylou Harris covering one of her songs or her joining Conor Oberst on stage to duet on “Lua,” but the storytelling here is purely expository, offering little personal detail beyond “there was a time when [she and I/he and I/all of us/you and I] were friends.”  As a mantlepiece, it’s admittedly handsome, but these stories need to live and bleed rather than sitting there elegantly posed and gathering dust.
[5]