The Singles Jukebox

Feel free to ask Anthony for more advice on successful adulthood…

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[6.83]

Anthony Easton: I never understood this desire to be a child. You are powerless, and other children are terrible as a general rule, plus most of the worlds great pleasures just are not understood by the small ones. I mean bills are a small price to pay for bourbon, fellatio, and organ meats.  
[5]

Alfred Soto: What a prosaic tune. There isn’t a single memorable phrase, no sustained thought beyond “man, shit is hard now.” So much depends on Vick Allen’s chalky late-period Al Green-indebted pipes, and he doesn’t disappoint. Black is black, right is wrong. He could use blurred lines.
[6]

Juana Giaimo: Vick Allen is not the first one to get nostalgic about childhood, but not many could make of it such a smooth and pleasing topic to listen to. 
[7]

Frank Kogan: Grown-up Vick is worried about having to pay child support when back as a kid he was blissful eating government cheese and other people were assigned the worrying. I suspect that nowadays govt. foodstuffs are way harder to come by in the nasty Republican South, so there’s hardly any going back anyway. Meanwhile, his voice is simultaneously a dark vortex of loss and a velvet deliciousness: pretty much perfect.
[8]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Allen has one of these lovingly old-fashioned voices — a little Gerald Alston, a little Ron Isley — that pushes forward “I’m Tired of Being Grown.” It seems like a joke for a voice so aged to sing about desiring to be a naif again. Perhaps it is a particularly witty one in its own way, seeing as it all eventually boils down to child support woes. It ain’t easy for the kid’s kids, either.
[7]

Brad Shoup: That Southern creep and metallic clang make this a sonic cousin to D’Angelo’s “She’s Always in My Hair” cover. It’s an incongruent touch, bracing and irritating and great. Allen stays reined, frequently dipping into a whisper, like he’s telling secrets to the yard. As far as the message, it moves from an inverted expression of nostalgia to something like pathology. He ticks off his outlays. Those clangs keep coming.
[8]