The Singles Jukebox

Let’s not, and say we did…

[Video][Website]
[4.62]

Jonathan Bradley: Florida Georgia Line is two goony guys with terrible haircuts and maybe one personality between the pair of them, and they’re at their best when they’re making big goony songs about dumb subjects like trucks and beer and girls. (It works because, at those moments, you don’t get the sense they’ve ever thought it possible to make songs about anything else.) The opening chords of “May We All” blow cold like the end of summer, which portends poorly for a band built for an endless July; when they get real, we get “H.O.L.Y.” But thank gosh, it still has stomps and handclaps, multiple references to an American-made car, and, yes, a ball-cap-bedecked love interest who exists for two non-consecutive lines. But it never quite shakes its melancholic feel — Tim McGraw, a singer who knows how to put the “…Dying” into “Live Like You Were…” helps with that — and I wonder: is Florida Georgia Line capable of fighting a culture war? “May we all get to grow up in our red, white, and blue little town” is that shivering opening lyric, and the prayer suggests we might not. Some listeners will hear this as a salute to an America of harvest moon marching bands and part-time tractor-driving jobs that is receding into the past, and while parts of a nostalgia-primed and conservative-friendly Nashville wouldn’t disagree, Florida Georgia Line’s ongoing outlook is innately optimistic. However these small towns change, they remain red, white, and blue; the jukeboxes just start mixing some Pac in with the Travis Tritt.
[7]

Katie Gill: May we all conform to Florida Georgia Line’s incredibly narrow view of growing up in idealized small-town Americana. I don’t know what’s more laughable, this play-by-play song or the idea that Travis Tritt and and 2Pac would be on the same jukebox in the first place. And didn’t we already hear this song from Tim earlier this year?
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: My beef with this song, and the exhausting hundreds like it, in eight words: “May we all … find a sweet little thing.” It would appear women are not included in “all.” Which is fine, because I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative of good ol’ boys who protest too much about fame and barely bother to sing.
[2]

Alfred Soto: Many Jukebox readers — indeed, members of our staff — regard country music with suspicion thanks to hokum like “May We All,” which has hair blowin’ out the window, marchin’ bands, harvest moons, juiced up and sexed up with “modern” touches. For this crime, Florida Georgia Line should be arrested and held without bond.
[3]

Anthony Easton: Generic is better than tonally offensive. 
[3]

Edward Okulicz: Lyrically it’s yet more bromides about small-town America, but it’s bright and enthusiastic. That guitar riff is kind of dreamy, in a “fall asleep looking up at clouds while the sun makes you hallucinate a bit” way. I can’t take it seriously but I can’t deny my toes tapping and that little bit of my brain that wonders what the house prices are in Anytown, South of the US.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: I’m not typically a fan of Joey Moi’s production work for FGL — in fact, I’m a pretty loudly avowed nonfan of FGL, period — but this one’s got a little something to it. The sweetly crying guitar lick that Moi runs through much of “May We All” gives it an almost painfully unique sound, and the chorus is Ford truck-sturdy, to better aid its lyrics. I love that almost none of the lines of this song rhyme; when’s the last time you heard a big country smash that pulled that trick? Lyrically this is essentially a midtempo “I Hope You Dance” or (hello, Tim!) “Live Like You Were Dying,” and it’s nearly as effective as those two acknowledged classics. Plus roping in McGraw for your single is never a bad idea, and his voice pairs nicely with those of the FGL guys. Best single they’ve ever released.
[7]

Josh Langhoff: Now this is impressive. Two prolific songwriters team up to write a scruffy Irish blessing whose first two verses are limericks — with zero rhymes. Either that took some doing or, more likely, it didn’t, bolstering suspicions that the audience depicted in lyrics like these will bite at whichever lazy small town signifiers drift their way. And yet… do I often miss living in a little town where people dream of fame and riches, know they probably won’t find either, and so learn to face their surroundings with outsize pride? Mais oui, y’all.
[6]