The Singles Jukebox

Hey Katie, how’s Country Day going?

[Video][Website]
[5.43]

Katie Gill: Country Day continues with something profoundly whatever. You know how “Without a Fight” was play-by-numbers but in an interesting and refreshing way, playing with the genre but also introducing a few new and different elements, making a damn good song in the process? This is just play-by-numbers. It’s a country song! It’s a sad country song! It brings nothing new to the table, but is so remarkably inoffensive and safe that I can’t, in good consciousness, call it bad.
[5]

Cassy Gress: Is it just me, or is Gwen’s current career being slowly defined by Blake Shelton? I don’t mean that he’s running her career (or maybe he is, I don’t know); it just feels like for the last year or so every song she puts out and everything she does is reinventing herself as Blake’s woman, and that irks me because she got famous by singing about how she’d had it up to here with being just a girl. I spent the entire four-and-a-half minutes of this song staring blankly at my monitor, no fucks left to give, growing increasingly more sour while thinking about how they were probably singing this while staring moonily into each other’s eyes. I mean, sure. The song is fine? Their voices meld together well enough, the melody is written adequately (though “Oh no, here I go” feels very much like filler), aaand I clearly have no ability to be anything resembling objective about this.
[3]

Thomas Inskeep: For the sake of transparency: I wanted to hate this song. The whole Blake-and-Gwen thing just leaves a bad, tabloid taste in my mouth. I don’t watch The Voice, and something about their celebrity relationship just feels so smarmy to me, so made-for-TV. Not to mention that Shelton’s a very hot-and-cold artist, and Stefani hasn’t made a good record in — well, it’s been so long that I can’t even remember. Watching their performance of “Go Ahead and Break My Heart” on The Voice is informative, however: you can see everything about their relationship telegraphed across Shelton’s face. (He has no poker face to speak of, and in this case that’s a good thing.) When Stefani’s singing the song’s second verse, in a couple cuts to Shelton you see him lip-syncing along with her, every word. It seems like this song was tailor-made for the two of them to sing, and it was; they co-wrote it together — the lyrics sound sincere coming from the couple. I actually wish that Shelton and his ex-wife Miranda Lambert had recorded a love song together that rang this true — and that’s the key. (The production, by Nashville stalwart Scott Hendricks, is Nashville-solid and unexceptional.) When I listen to a love song, I want to believe it, and Shelton and Stefani make me believe this one, and, by extension, how they feel about each other. I don’t doubt for one moment that every word they’re singing together, to each other, is true. And isn’t that what the best love duets are supposed to do? 
[8]

Anthony Easton: It is impossible to ignore the biography here, but I wonder if it is a distraction. The twang is still there, and Shelton overwhelms Stefani’s voice until her verse — and she does a passable Nashville imitation. Her influence seems to be that sped-up, almost ’80s production. It’s not a pop song and I am not sure it fits on country radio, but I am not sure they work together as vocal partners. I wonder if the success of this might be entirely meta. (Especially the problem of making a masochistic desire song, nominally about an old lover, sung with a new lover.) 
[6]

Alfred Soto: I wish co-writer Gwen Stefani’s harmonies were louder and the chorus distinctive, but the hook is unassailable and Blake Shelton brings conviction to the part of a guy who wants to believe in love and knows it’s going to suck. Coming from a singer who often looks like a wax rendering of himself, “Go Ahead and Break My Heart” shows he’s got a pulse, and, yes, I credit his ex.
[7]

Brad Shoup: This suits Stefani better than Shelton; she navigates it like it’s “Simple Kind of Life”. I don’t want to sell him short, though: there’s a snap in his voice, like he’s willing to win this particular game of chicken.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: The arrangement ensures Gwen Stefani knows her place on the wrong side of the featuring credit; for someone with as consummate a post-breakup burner in her catalogue as “Cool,” she still can’t find the pocket on “Go Ahead and Break My Heart.” Blake Shelton can if he tries, but he can’t be bothered here, and since he’s the one hogging the spotlight, that’s a problem. He’s better with some dirt on his boots, and while he and Stefani found their locus in national television, they might be better advised to look to their respective roots as a more productive source of creative tension. 
[4]