When Did You Leave Heaven?

The words

An admirer marvels at a woman so lovely that she must have come down from heaven, and wonders how.

The song is a classic Tin Pan Alley compliment: the singer treats his beloved as an angel who has strayed to earth and asks, with mock seriousness, how heaven could have let her go. It is sweet, courtly and old-fashioned, built on a gentle melody and a single extended conceit. Dylan sings it softly over a sparse, keyboard-heavy backing, foreshadowing his much later albums of standards from the same era.

Words by Walter Bullock