The Singles Jukebox

NOT reunited and it feels so boring!

[Video][Website]
[4.71]

Thomas Inskeep: I love how a few backing harmonies can now get you a “featuring” credit — it happened with Vince Gill on Chris Young’s current single, and now it’s the closest thing we’re gonna get anytime soon to a recorded Brooks & Dunn reunion, thanks to Brooks’s appearance on Ronnie Dunn’s latest solo record. “If you were a whiskey, girl, I’d be a damn drunk” isn’t exactly the strongest lyric around which to base a single, but Dunn sounds great of course (he’s never not sounded great in 25 years of records), Brooks’s harmonies are sweet (of course), and the production, courtesy of Rascal Flatts’s Jay DeMarcus, is sturdy and strong and acquits itself nicely (this sounds better than most Rascal Flatts records of recent vintage, in fact). 
[6]

Alfred Soto: Dunn’s gnarled tenor is too good for this sheet of yellow legal paper with “angels” and “gee-tars” underlined as if for emphasis. Besides, Toby Keith beat him to “Whiskey Girl.”
[4]

Iain Mew: It’s a dull old metaphor, which Dunn doesn’t expand on but adds to a pile of others with no more shine. That the music is nearly enough to light up anyway is a testament to the power of a chorus chugging away like Fearless-era Taylor Swift, even at this distance.
[5]

Katie Gill: They actually turned the amps to eleven, not the guitar. It’s a good song, but it only furthers my dislike of the modern country industry. How should it be this hard for freaking Brooks and Dunn to push themselves out of the crowd? They had a unique sound back in the 1990s that you can only see traces of here. The saving grace is Dunn’s powerful voice but it can only go so far.
[5]

Anthony Easton: This song is anti-mess. It tepidly pushes the gates, spins nothing more than cliches, is as hard as a Shirley Temple, never leaves the earth, and the guitars stick to about what my score is.  
[2]

Madeleine Lee: To me, this sounds like it could have been made at any point in the last 20 or so years. The lyrics are nothing novel, and I have no idea what “if you were this guitar, I’d turn it to 11” means as a metaphor. But logic doesn’t matter in this song, only feeling, and there’s plenty of feeling in Dunn’s vocal performance that takes this song beyond just competent.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: Weak lyrics sung with pop virtuosity by Dunn, but this sounds like, has the depth of, and actually is Rascall Flatts. Not that I hate Rascall Flatts, “Rewind” was a really underrated single, but their low-watt cornball fare suits a low-watt cornball ham of a singer. This would also suit a caricaturist who paints in platitudes and anecdotal scraps like Keith Urban, more than it suits Dunn, whose voice is richer and has far more capacity to soar. And soar it tries to do, but the words and tune are stiff and pleasureless other than when he pledges to break down the gates of Heaven.
[5]