The Singles Jukebox

We’d rather have been happy than right this time…

[Video][Website]
[3.08]

Chris Boeckmann: More like Blandfest A ft. Blandfest B – “Go Away,” amirite?
[3]

Anthony Miccio: No, Sara Bareilles should join OneRepublic. Let’s build supergroups by adding modest pop figures to established brands (if you don’t keep the old name, you’re at square one) so that solo careers can be enhanced (or written off) as side projects of a Fleetwood Mac-style smash. Whether they create worthwile music or incoherent sleeping aids like this, it’s just good business sense.
[2]

Michaelangelo Matos: A whole new world, a new fantastic point of view.
[3]

Dave Moore: Approached this one with some trepidation and it actually took me a second to figure out if Sara or OneRepublic was singing the first verse. Good for a chuckle, but yeah, this sounds exactly like what I thought it’d sound like — dueling grand pianos center stage with a blue-gel spotlight, bored string quartet off to the side, neither singer getting anywhere close to some hypothetical final-round American Idol contestant blowing them both out of the water.
[3]

Martin Kavka: If I were not a native English speaker, I would think that the plot of this song entailed Sara Bareilles heroically transporting a dying hyena, bleating all the while, to the nearest veterinary clinic. Alas, it was too late.
[3]

Matt Cibula: This, more than anything else I can think of in the entire world of music, sucks. Gutless, empty, boring, tune-deprived twaddle.
[0]

Martin Skidmore: Bareilles is classy and confident in her vocal part, and this is a more than decent song, as you’d expect from Ryan Tedder – maybe if he had given it to her, or to someone like Leona Lewis, it could have been excellent, but his singing is weak, and the Coldplay music (with Beatles strings in one part) is very dreary, so I don’t connect with the feelings much.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Ryan Tedder has taken so much shit from us lately that I’m reluctant to dig my own knee into his groin. This love theme for an imaginary sequel to Baz Luhrman’s “Romeo & Juliet” (directed by McG) offers none of the overwrought melodrama of “Apologize” but much of the same incoherence. “Everything I can’t be is everything you should be” is one thing, but a “war between the vanities” doesn’t even rebound on Tedder’s own sense of himself as poet laureate of transnational goop.
[4]

Kat Stevens: I’ve never been a fan of Ryan’s voice (or face) but his ability to wring genuine weepy heartbreak out of mawkish piano ballads cannot be denied. If it were not for the fact that this track is clearly destined to be used in an uplifting movie of the same name about Our Brave Troops In Afghanistan (where the soliders are played by animated woodland animals and the Taliban are cgi shadows with glowing red eyes) I would probably give this an 8.
[6]

Chuck Eddy: If this doesn’t end up in episode of Army Wives (the sappiest TV show I love, and with the worst soundtrack), I will eat my old dogtags.
[3]

John Seroff: It takes a special, cynical sort of talent to craft music for people who don’t much like music. Your lyrics have to be far-reaching and vague enough to embrace an array of specific user-exploitable perspectives (Who should come home? A lover? A soldier? Jesus? Whatever). Your melody should be wafer-thin; not exactly hummable, but smooth, simple and as palatable and unnourishing as salted butter. The voices should be young and clear, aimlessly unremarkable but ziplock-professional. The production has to be perfect; push the vox up to the front for maximum pathos, sublimate the strings to keep that withdrawn yearning a’roiling, enhance the vocal flourishes and finish with an array of false endings to leave room for station identification. If you pull it off, you’ve got the perfect non-confrontational sound-spackle to fill the truly empty spaces: long car rides with lil’ sis and grandma, grocery store trips, doctor’s waiting rooms, dentist chairs, primetime American Idol auditions. Maybe you get lucky and your soul-deadening, blandly derivative Product _(TM) gets picked up for an Allstate ad or plays under the preview for the new Meg Ryan comeback film. Dare to dream.
[2]

Keane Tzong: The musical equivalent of mixing Xanax with Ambien.
[3]