How does it go again, Tom?

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[4.38]

Patrick St. Michel: “Hey girl, you make me want to write a song.” This is what you came up with, Thomas Rhett? Don’t share it with her, she might be a little offended by the blandness.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Let’s hope the song that the girl inspired has more to it than those ooh-ooh-oohs. 
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: “You make me wanna write a song — set you down, sing it to you all night long” –c’mon, Thomas, you know this is about sex (because you tiptoe toward the explicit later), and continuing the metaphor makes the chorus one laugh after another. Also, the guitar feedback at the start primes me for “Piece of Me,” which this does not deliver. Nobody recovers from that.
[3]

Anthony Easton: Rhett as a songwriter has become fashionable (he’s all over the latest Blake) and I always thought that publishing was where the money was. I wonder why he keeps trying to work with a performing career — his voice is flat enough that he has to push instrumentation too far in the other direction as a kind of dodge. 
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Brad Shoup: The number of people who can begin a song with “hey girl” is much smaller than you’d think. Doesn’t include Rhett, anyway. “It Goes Like This” is a trick of the songwriting light, with the verses’ key turned down to sunset, allowing Rhett to mewl purpoefully into the mic until the doubletime chorus comes to make you think he’s suddenly in rapture. Still, some sort of new country/R&B merger is probably no more than a couple months away.
[4]

Scott Mildenhall: Say Wikipedia, in the “Content” section of their “It Goes Like This” page: “In the song, the narrator states that he wants to write a song about a girl whom he finds attractive.” And who’s to argue? It would have been better had it gone like “And it goes like oooh, you got what I need, but you say ‘he’s just a friend’” as it should have done; without that it is beyond bland. Full marks for accuracy though, probably (the contradictory closing couplet aside) — of all the songs people in movies have written for people they like, most must… go like this — but not for anything else.
[5]

Will Adams: I like the idea of taking the meta structure — made so gooey by Elton John and Natasha Bedingfield — and darkening it with angsty chords. In practice, it’s drab. Thomas Rhett has charm, but he also has an absence of anything to say. I guess songwriting is difficult!
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Pretty much everyone who’s ever fallen in love has tried to write a song about it. Most of them are just about this good.
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