The Singles Jukebox

Just a tad folksier than Olly Murs…

[Video]
[5.88]

Thomas Inskeep: The best ’90s Emmylou Harris song of the ’10s. I wish the production did a bit more, but the harmonies of Carlile and her backing singers are Sunday-morning-gorgeous.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Sung and arranged with care, but I hear not a single interesting metaphor.
[4]

Josh Langhoff: And over in this corner, hurricane’s all like, “Yes yes I’m a metaphor rich in paradox but I’MMA KILL YOU AND RUIN YR INFRASTRUCTURE!!!!! Good song tho. WHOOOOOSH.”
[6]

Brad Shoup: The line about how you can dance in the hurricane’s eye broke my heart. Then I replayed the song a bunch of times, and it kinda healed itself. Carlile tears into the text from the jump, with just an acoustic and a bass and a dude or two for accompaniment. Just typing that reminds me of “Silver Springs,” and suddenly I’m back on board.
[7]

David Sheffieck: The production’s almost too hushed, but perhaps that’s necessary: any more and it might unbalance Carlile’s tense, bracing, beautiful harmonies. This is the kind of ’70s revival I can get behind (non-dance category) — a song that sounds like nothing new in the best way, executed with a level of skill and emotion that would tug on anyone’s heartstrings.
[7]

Anthony Easton: She has a good enough voice, but the last few years have had some of the best, most specific and difficult symbolic language in the history of a genre rife with it, so this kind of cliche-ridden sloppiness betrays the performance.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: “I am a sturdy soul,” she sings, which describes “The Eye” well: quietly sturdy. I often miss sturdiness.
[6]

Tara Hillegeist: That first verse alone: “it really breaks my heart”, “to see a dear old friend”, and “go down to the worn-out place again” as a series of phrases, conjuring up their own feelings and images, alone, before they cohere into a narrative, the lines build in length and emotional intensity as that narrative reveals itself, Carlile stretching out her vowels, leaving pregnable spaces for the meaning to sink in behind the words–that takes craft, and that takes skill, and that takes work–it’s a bullet in an echo chamber, shot up with a grim hope that I have spent more hours in my life feeling than hearing felt back at me. But I do know it, to hear it.
[8]