The Singles Jukebox

Do you keep them in a jar?

[Video]
[6.00]

Tobi Tella: Connecting her relationship to all the other people in her life, the intimate details that you share, the way that you open your past to others is a powerful idea. It gives the song stakes, something I feel modern country can lack way too often. It’s a little on-the-nose, but the strong concept carries it through, and Ingrid sells it.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Few songs limn the tension between moms and daughters, fewer still on the frustrated love without which the tension wouldn’t exist. I wish “More Hearts Than Mine” had lingered on this dynamic, but Ingrid Andress has the rest of the family to introduce to her new boyfriend. Striving for the specificity of a solid country song, “More Hearts” settles for rote characterizations: of course Dad will pretend not to like him and sis will ask a million questions (she rhymes “tires” and “ice and,” but kudos to the image of Dad offering the guy a cocktail). And why the hell would she claim the guy will break more hearts “if they break up”? How’s that relevant? The piano plays, as these developments have prepared us for, an average melody.
[5]

Hazel Southwell: Just listening to this has made me incredibly stressed about the idea of Ingrid’s invasively nosy family and the way they apparently interfere in relationships.
[4]

Josh Buck: “If I bring you home to mama/I guess I’d better warn ya/She falls in love a little faster than I do” is one of those lyrics that is so precise and evocative one wonders how it survived until 2019 without being written. I love this record with my heart, not my head. It brought me back to formative moments with the families of the southern girls that I dated throughout high school and college. A mom who stayed up late to help me with algebra homework, a dad who taught me how to shoot a gun. Dinners with the family, where I experienced a kind of worldliness I never knew at home, dinners where the dad would foot the bill and mom would give me drink recommendations. I don’t know if Andress has anything else this good in her arsenal, but I know I’ll be crying to this one for years.
[9]

Thomas Inskeep: Sara Bareilles with a country twang, and I’m okay with that. Starts a bit too much like a power ballad for my taste, but gains steam as it goes, and the chorus is great.
[6]

Oliver Maier: Some really lovely details in the first verse, torpedoed as the chorus rolls around and “More Hearts Than Mine” reveals itself as a baffling preemptive guilt trip. I’m no expert lyricist but surely there are better ways of teasing out nice details like the overenthusiastic sister and tsundere dad than tacitly threatening your partner with how sad they’ll all be if things ever go down the toilet. The melody and Andress’s performance are pleasant enough in isolation, but telegraphing this much post-breakup bitterness (“I’ll be fine“) with no breakup apparently in sight is nothing if not a huge red flag. And the drums sound dreadful!
[4]

Isabel Cole: What makes this is the performance: Andress’s voice, lovely with an occasional lonesome creak like a familiar floorboard, sounds so sorrowful it imbues the song with all the tentative hope and secret fear of realizing you’re crossing the line past which you can no longer escape unscathed, so that the titular line comes across as displacement for everything left unsaid in the lie, “if we’ll break up, I’ll be fine.”
[7]