The Singles Jukebox

Get out of our heads…

[Video][Website]
[3.75]

Gin Hart: I never thought I’d have so much gosh-darn fun with a ghost-writ pop country song about the spooky girl next door, but here we are. I’m even charmed, possibly especially so, that nobody involved in the video seems mighty familiar with the Tarot as a practice, least of all the artist himself, who “love[s] the twist to it.” The girl gives it to us, more storyboard than spread, fashioning divination as direct milestone-for-milestone prescience: The Empress (the most archetypical sensual and feminine — yet still motherly — energy in the deck, here the eponymous Mind Reader) meets The Knight of Cups (our boy Dusty, softest of knights in shining Resistor, wide-eyed and ready), and they ride out in his Chariot (hahaha oh god, his muscle car) beneath The Moon (well, it is night; this card ordinarily bespeaks illusion, anxiety, and dreamtime, but this psychic boho princess doesn’t seem shadowy beyond the conceit of her premonitions) and Star[s] (still night, true, but also connotes entrance into a time of blessings and transformation, and as such is the most subtly appropriate card in use), finally becoming The Lovers. The confluence of fate and free will is gentle here. Everybody is hip to the mysticism and wants to follow its lead. Nobody seems a victim or a pawn. Happy magic, a knock at the door, oh witchy girl. Points off for the use of g**sy (it’s a slur, look it up!), but otherwise the goofily earnest conceptual love song I didn’t know I needed.
[7]

Katie Gill: So it turns out country music hasn’t got the memo that “gypsy” is a biiiit of a controversial term. With lyrics this cliché, I was waiting for “might as well call you a telepath” or “how’d you know to compliment my hat” but then again, it takes actual effort to think of a clunky rhyme for “telepath,” something that Lynch seems to be lacking.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: Who’d have thought Dustin Lynch might like smiles and kissing and perfume and a girl who likes him, gosh, this song’s subject is talented, extrapolating all that from the fact that Lynch is a guy. I knew this song would drop “gypsy” in verse two. I wonder what that makes me.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: There’s really nothing to this beyond the lyrical conceit, which is treated with more gravity than the songwriters probably intended. The sturdy yet anonymous production provides only a partial distraction from the vacuousness, playing to Lynch’s strengths (his voice) while leaving exposed his faults (the words coming out of it). If this girl really could read minds, the narrator would be one of the people she tests her powers on before moving on to more challenging targets.
[4]

Alfred Soto: Co-writer Rhett Atkins continues a career of tuneful averageness: no unexpected chord change and no ribald lyric darkens his skies. Dustin Lynch honors Atkins’s intentions.
[3]

Brad Shoup: Her powers of prediction are impressive, but only for someone who’s avoided the last few years of bro-country.
[3]

Peter Ryan: The opening riff hearkens back to the great Queen of Slickness herself — I am fine with this, not a problem at all. Pouty longing vibes on the first verse and that swoopy thing he’s doing in and out of the low range of his voice — still not complaining. But oof everything after is just corny and not cute — that chorus is as wooden as his smile and god there are so many other metaphors for clairvoyance that don’t involve slurs. Yucky and boring.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: “How’d you know them little tore up jeans was gonna tear me up and turn me on?” I don’t know, maybe because every bro-country dude won’t shut up about them? Maybe she is a mind reader, anything’s possible, but Dustin Lynch — who sounds like the output of a country-music Rando Simulator — definitely is not. One, because he’d know I’d hear the chorus as “you’re a little mime” and there’s no recovering from that. Two, because the levels of condescension here — the “little”s repeated to drinking-game excess, that tiresome pickup-artist trick of dictating to a girl exactly what she wouldn’t think unprompted — would make me want to steer the car into a ditch.
[3]