The Singles Jukebox

Sweet dreams are made of [3]s…

[Video][Website]
[3.86]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Funny, I just did listening to this. 
[2]

Will Adams: Relatable title, sure, but I really get the feeling that not too long ago, someone, somewhere made a monkey’s paw wish of, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a ‘Love In This Club’ revival in pop?” and the results were Why Don’t We and this.
[3]

Alfred Soto: When they emulate Usher, my disdain softens. Usher would never mix sincerity and whimsy like these fools, though.
[2]

Oliver Maier: I might’ve been convinced that the hilarious mismatch between triumphant climax and depressive lyrics was done with some self-awareness had this not been the same duo who penned the vacuous “10,000 Hours”. Shay has that Adam Levine quality of sounding like he only knows about emotions from other people describing them to him, and while Levine occasionally masks that by cosplaying having a sex drive, Shay tries and fails to compensate via pure quirkiness. This could have leaned harder into cinematic cheese à la Electric Light Orchestra and at least been more fun, but the full arrangement enters much too late. One bonus point for the B-flat chord in the chorus, which they needn’t have bothered with but did anyway.
[4]

Juana Giaimo: I thought this was just another sad ballad, but suddenly the bridge took me by surprise. I’m not sure that kind of sudden break benefits the song, but the last chorus has a spacey, less structured kind of feeling that I wish would be present throughout the whole track. 
[6]

David Moore: This song could really use more details. For instance, the other night I didn’t go to bed not ONLY because I was sad and anxious, but also because, after watching the third episode of the fifth season of Northern Exposure (“Jaws of Life”), I googled the career of the actor who played the dentist, Jay O. Sanders, only to find that he was the voice of the Weinstein figure in the Jeanne Dielman-ish film The Assistant, which just the other day I’d watched twenty minutes of with my wife before turning it off and reading the plot summary to see if we were missing anything, and then of course I went down additional simultaneous rabbit holes for my instinctive Chantal Akerman comparison (shallow and inapt) and the film’s star, Julia Garner (I have heard of but never seen almost everything she’s been in — was Martha Marcy May Marlene good? I remember hearing it was good?) and then a separate Julia Garner rabbit hole to see if she is related to any other famous Garners before realizing that the person she reminds me of Julia Stiles, whom I doubt she has any formal relation to, what with sharing only her first name. (Was Julia Stiles in Hanna? No. What was she in?) Then I did a crossword and refreshed my Twitter feed a bunch of times and then logged off of Twitter to stop myself from refreshing it so frequently but still checked ten or so individual Twitter accounts anyway, and then I checked my email again (zero new emails) and then checked my email again immediately after that (zero new emails) and then I did that thing where I just sit staring at an article I’m not really reading, one that’s been open in an old tab for god knows how long, and highlighting random sections of the text, making an irritating click-click, click-click, click-click sound until my wife got annoyed at me and told me I should probably go to bed. Anyway, Dan, Shay, whoever (is this a Veronicas type situation?), the perils of screen time are real, keep that phone out of your bedroom overnight.
[3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Nostalgia hits in the strangest ways. This doesn’t quite recall nights spent at parties that you go to escape your sorrows or the grand ’70s power balladry that Shay is clearly straining his voice to achieve. Instead it brings me into an altogether different set of memories, of some hybrid of days in 2012 or 2013 spent ruminating as a teen on Fun. or Lady Gaga and of nights on the decade’s other end spent walking friends through emotionally fraught decisions. It’s a decidedly small-scale drama conjured here, but that’s why I like it so much — even in the grand push of the bridge and the anthemic reach of the chorus, “I Should Probably Go To Bed” is second-guessing itself, sighing knowingly about its own joke.
[7]