Luke Bryan – Drunk on You
The last time I was at a tailgate, someone spilled Bud Lite all over my jeans. Luke may be singing about this.
[Video][Website]
[5.50]
Katherine St Asaph: The perfectly inert soundtrack for an afternoon of lolling and day-drinking at Pantana Bob’s, drawlingly serenading your sundressed sorority girl of choice. But I’m neither serenader nor serenadee (as Luke’s criteria make clear), so this is useless for me. It’ll likely be useful for them, but I can’t imagine why, considering the songwriters and instrumentalists evidently all stopped trying after they got their “drunk on you and high on summertime” soundbite.
[3]
Iain Mew: All the “mmm mmm”s and “boom booms” he throws in can’t really make up for the fact that the song sounds way too staid for the fevered state of excitement that he’s describing. It sounds overly calculated and a little weird. I suppose I’m not really in a position to criticise someone who in moments of enjoyment is spending their time quantifying a precise rating out of ten, but at least I only do it with songs.
[3]
Brad Shoup: Nonsense syllables have turned in noble service since rock ‘n’ roll’s Golden Age, transmuting silliness into ineffability. “Drunk On You” is the latest in a lineage that includes “Wham Bam” and “La La (Means I Love You)”, the Spice Girls’ zigs and Beyoncé’s boofs. Bryan’s flirts with inherited meaning, but the meter (and that extra “boom”) gives the phrase a winning childishness. I’m on record for on-record goofiness, and Bryan turning a standard erotic trope (the country girl getting appropriately rowdy on a tailgate) into a sweetly-held memory meets my criteria.
[9]
Anthony Easton: I expect no wisdom or wit from my country music, at least the country sung from Easter to September. This makes me a little drunk and a lot twitterpated, and his voice is as lovely as it is slightly silly.
[7]
Jonathan Bogart: The goonishly maudlin video is a sequel to the goonishly maudlin “I Don’t Want This Night to End,” and the song’s a lighters-up ballad compared to the more uptempo (but only slightly more) previous single. “Drunk on you and high on summertime” is a nice turn of phrase, but it’d be nicer if I didn’t feel I’d heard it in every fifth country hit sung by a dude over the past three years.
[4]
Alfred Soto: The mandolin/guitar chug evoke Matchbox 20’s only good hit “Unwell,” and while I prefer chunk like Eric Church’s “Drink in My Hand,” Bryan goes one better than Blake Shelton’s similarly lovebuzzed “Who Are You When I’m Not Lookin'”: his uncertain, creamy register guarantees he’ll never be just a lout.
[7]
The song I kept hearing was Rascal Flatts’ “Fast Cars and Freedom”. I’m repping for that ’til I die.
And going off what Katherine said, the “high on summertime” bit actually struck me as an afterthought. Bryan sells the “drunk on you” half so well in the verses/most of the chorus that the seasonal reference comes off like chart insurance.
Exactly. (Except for the selling the “drunk on you” part, unless it’s 90-degree day drinking maybe.)
By the way, if you are not a North Carolinian and thus not familiar with Pantana Bob’s, it is exactly what you are picturing from that blurb.
Like, the drunk part is also an afterthought?
I think our equivalent might be C. Hunt’s. You’re welcome to finish your bucket of beers on a bench after they close up.
This does remind me a bit of “Unwell” too – though the only good M.20 hit for me is “Disease”.