The Singles Jukebox

We see your point, Kayla and Wayne…

[Video]
[3.50]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: One point, seems right.
[1]

Katie Gill: Strictly defined genres are dead, long live strictly defined genres. Until we hit the bridge, the song is a fairly solid game of “is this pop music with a huge country influence or country music with a huge pop influence.” Unfortunately, that fun genre blend is pretty much the only thing interesting about this song. I’m not surprised that Kane Brown is the next country artist to cross-over to pop radio, I am a little surprised that the song he’s doing it with is so middle of the road.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Don’t blame “Old Town Road” for alerting audiences to country’s syncretic nature. Some work, some don’t, etc. Kane Brown’s collaboration with Marshmello gets one thing right: the high, lonely pedal steel guitar. The rest is Everlast. 
[4]

Will Rivitz: The rare country/EDM crossover that works tends to either go full neon (“The Middle”) or revel in its genre-unmoored iconoclasm (though I don’t particularly like it, I understand the power of “Wake Me Up”). “One Thing Right,” in presenting itself as a straight pop-country track until a drop which nudges towards Marshmello’s usual bombast with soggy-pancake force, does neither of these things, simultaneously a poorly-stitched crossover not a part of either field and yet a carbon copy of a carbon copy of better songs in both.
[2]

Michael Hong: “One Thing Right” feels like the complete midpoint between Marshmello and Kane Brown, Kane Brown’s aching R&B vocals with an earthy country twang layered over Marshmello’s lifeless instrumental reaching for some release that comes out as a too-short muted drop. The collaboration is also expectedly, completely middle of the road. While Kane Brown might have written “One Thing Right” as a country song, the nondescript storytelling pushes it further into the monogenre and the only real signifier that this was ever a country song is that slight twang in his vocals.
[3]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Kane Brown’s vocal melodies are slick enough for this to have been an enjoyable crossover hit, but the guitars are too distractingly bright or jagged on multiple occasions to go down smooth. The lap steel in the second verse is the one moment where the instrumentation perfectly captures Brown’s melancholy.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: If you doubted that country radio is basically just ’90s soft rock, observe how adding Marshmello to a Kane Brown track results in something very close to “Torn.” Which really sets a floor for the score here.
[6]

Stephen Eisermann: Kane actually got one more thing right: this boring lyric and generic country-pop track shouldn’t work, but this slaps. Maybe it’s the guitar riff in the background, maybe it’s Kane’s vocal, either way it works.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: What Marshmello does to those guitars is piercing to my ears, like a car alarm. Might explain the video, or it might not. “One Thing Right” is one solid hook, that being the three syllables of the title, and a lot of poorly-worn cliches. My score is reflective of having heard it on the radio at the same time very day while in the office and being completely sick of it, but probably one listen would have had the same effect as 40.
[3]

Kayla Beardslee: Wow, this is soulless.
[1]