Swear to God, I thought he was wearing a vial necklace at first…

[Video][Website]
[4.78]
John Seroff: Redneck poetry of the decidedly corny variety that acquits itself honestly for the first verse and then veers into mumblemouth backtracking and preciousness undermined with Brice’s too-revealing asides. Confiding with the listener that your girl’s “heard all your lines” may be meant to establish a bro-down, but it just comes off creepy. The country torch song equivalent of drive-thru chicken.
[4]
Sabina Tang: Lee uses sincere commitment to long-term relationship building. It is super effective! I particularly like that unresolved chord when he sings “…if I were a single man,” that lets you know the killer charm line is around the bend.
[8]
Michaela Drapes: Ask a stupid question, and if you’re lucky, Lee Brice will pull your leg a little bit with a hefty slice of sweet sentimentality pie on the side. It totally warms my cold, dead heart a little to know that this is probably the perfect soundtrack to a million relationships out there, even if I’m still in sugar shock from that (inevitable, right?) final verse. The unbusy arrangement (turns out this is just a spruced-up demo) goes a long way to making this close-ish to perfect; any bigger and it would’ve been a stinker.
[7]
Brad Shoup: With its lullaby picking and this-one-time conversational structure, this reminds me a lot of the execrable “People Are Crazy”. The tenderness of the text, and the lack of chest-beating, redeems the proceedings somewhat. But precious is still trouncing tender, so I fold.
[4]
Anthony Easton: Lee Brice has a gorgeous voice, the instrumentation is smooth, and the wry, pleasure for pleasure’s sake refusals have their clever moments, but this is mostly disposable. It doesn’t even have the contempt for women that makes the homosociality of male competitiveness interesting, and it denies the women’s voice entirely. The only reason why he is glad they are together is a kind of use function. That’s pure contempt that isn’t even well thought out.
[3]
Jonathan Bogart: It’s not the tired, sub-sitcom clichés about Slovenly Men Versus The Golden Goddesses Who Love Them that get me, it’s the unfiltered smugness. “C’mon girl, seriously,” in that Adam Sandler sincerity-whine deserves not so much an exasperated-but-forgiving smile as a kick in the teeth.
[2]
Katherine St Asaph: The narrative here is bad enough — an escalating plea of “if I hadn’t met you, I’d be a mere sitcom schlub, lost in a bro dystopia and needing an angel to fetch me like a ferret out of the filth.” But the delivery’s worse; taming the he-beast apparently made Lee sing like a cowed child who’s one thought away from crying. At the risk of perpetuating gender stereotypes, I think he’d sound more interesting single.
[3]
Iain Mew: Lee already sounds needy, but then he gets to his whispered confession that “I get sick deep sea fishing” and the whole thing becomes stark and a bit strange. I guess the idea is to set up all of his single activities as not being worth as much as his married life, but doing things that make him sick? The general lack of enthusiasm in anything else? He says that “she’s heard all of my lines” but that verse doesn’t sound like planned lines so much as a genuine admission that he had no pleasure in his life at all before. “She knows what a mess I’d be/If I didn’t have her here” sounds all too believable. Between that and the lack of information about her beyond yoga, fried chicken and (unspecified) lovely-sounding name, “I’d be looking for a woman like you” sounds like not a compliment but a desperate quest for someone, anyone, to give meaning to his life. This is close to being a gender-flipped “Video Games”, and the only thing keeping it from being as heartbreaking is that the music doesn’t know to play along.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Dierks Bentley and Toby Keith in red-solo-cup mode would have spread the smugness with a butter knife, so thank womankind that Brice’s crinkled tones and conversational cadences adduce his sincerity more than the cold Bud Light he ain’t drinkin’ or the golf game he ain’t playin’. I gave him a chance. Ladies, you do too.
[6]
Leave a Reply