I think I could understaaaaaaaand…

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[5.29]

Alfred Soto: She keeps growing as a singer: she doesn’t stumble over lines like “Sittin’ pretty on the prairie, baby/I’m your huckleberry, let me hold ya.” She and co-writer Jesse Frasure come with octave leaps and spaces for gnarly guitar fills. Familiar but not a bore, like a friend who tells the same jokes that make you grin every time.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: Lambert has played with tropes of wildness and abandon in keeping with the cowboy stereotype much more thoughtfully than this. If I’m nodding, it’s because she’s like an old friend and I forgive her anything, but taken completely dispassionately, it’s a pretty weak melody too. And I never thought I’d say this about a Miranda Lambert single, but she doesn’t bring any of her reliable spark to the performance either. Miranda Lambert singles can be lots of things but how many of them before this one could you have really deployed “bland” as a descriptor?
[4]

Andy Hutchins: Co-writer Jesse Frasure — DJ Telemitry, if you’re a nerd — has written a bunch of decent to great country songs, many of which have been hits, but he’s never worked with Miranda Lambert prior to “If I Was a Cowboy.” He’s also only touched one Kacey Musgraves song, the fairly traditional and mid-tempo “Wonder Woman,” which is why “Cowboy” mimicking so much of Same Trailer, Different Park-era Kacewave and yet letting Miranda rattle off motor-mouthed verses is such a strange combination of choices. Many of the best Musgraves songs grant a lot of space for artist to breathe and listener to think; Lambert sounds rushed here, like she’s trying to convey a quantity of concepts to compensate for the relative lack of quality of each one. And the way “So mamas, if your daughters grow up / To be cowboys, so what?” gets mangled in the delivery is just a shame.
[5]

Nina Lea: There’s something beautiful about Nashville, about a city of songwriters endlessly puzzling over how to craft the perfect song. And there’s no better game in town than a Miranda Lambert number. She makes country-pop sound utterly effortless, managing the trick of conjuring up Wild West panoramas that are expansive yet rich with meticulous lyrical detail. I mean, “This six-gun sugar’s got a hairpin trigger, like I told ya”? I swoon! Sure, it can get platitudinous: “If I was a cowboy, I’d be the queen” doesn’t hit as hard as it should. But Lambert slips in the real payoff after after the chorus, a bridge that ever-so-subtly packs a punch with its “so what?”
[7]

Andrew Karpan: Like a lot of Lambert’s best work, the song doubles as a mood-piece that uses the signifiers of country to perform various forms of agitation: a project that connects her to the larger lineage of “outlaw” country in one breath and elevates the records into a sincere form of camp in the other. There’s gas station charm to how she holds her breath and in the exact deployment of her long sigh, which hit when she promises something more wild than even the west.
[6]

Joshua Lu: There’s hints of “Bluebird” here, namely in the whispery hooks that elevate the gentle soundscape here. But while “If I Was a Cowboy” attempts to capture the carefree whimsy of her latest country radio #1, Lambert’s unfeeling, drawn-out vocals throughout the song dampen the song’s energy too much, evoking exhaustion more than anything. The lyrics match the mushiness, wavering too much between vaguely autobiographical pap and didactic drivel.
[4]

Ian Mathers: Kind of feels like in terms of pop country, the word “Cowboy” has now both been so overdetermined in so many different directions and also overused to the point of semantic oversatiation so that this otherwise perfectly pleasant wisp of a song winds up feeling a bit sinister and pablum-like at the exact same time. No idea if this is an attempt at “reclaiming” the term or whatever, but if so, it ain’t working.
[4]