The Singles Jukebox

She did pretty well last time, too…

[Video][Website]
[7.14]

Anthony Easton: Sunny has such a catch in her voice, and is a master of moral ambiguity. This song, not a cheating song or an angry song, but a work about the delicate calculation that one constructs in the midst of emotional and sexual relationships, is less explicit than last year’s single, but it sounds like the mascara smeared with tears that feature so prominently in the video.
[10]

Jonathan Bogart: The problem with tackling such universal material — we’ve all been in places where staying was worse than leaving, even if it just means quitting a bad job — with less-than-stellar songwriting is that the emotional content can take a back seat to the trying-to-hard craftsmanship. Never mind that treason, reason, and breathin’ don’t rhyme with leavin’ — awkwardly shoving grievin’ in to fit the scheme pulls me out of the song and makes me think of the Nashville songwriting team high-fiving each other for forcing the rhyme.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Sunny presses about ten songs’ melodies together until some of the parts stick — the cadence on “stay-y-y-ing” in particular is about five songs in one — then squeezes the remaining notes, as if through a frosting tube, into a smooth guitar part. Simple craftsmanship is still craft.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: Sunny has a powerful twang and sings the hell out of the song, but she’s not so great she can give it the friction it needs. It’s a pretty melody, but it’s not really much more . On “From A Table Away” she inhabited the narrative and sold her breaking but numbed heart, whereas here she’s trying to sell a bunch of words thrown together around a couple of five-dollar-phrases. As such, the words speak to nothing in particular, no matter how sweetly they’re sung. Which is pretty sweetly, mind you, but this woman has shown she can act out the toughest stories in country.
[7]

Iain Mew: I got such a rollicking me-against-the-world feel from the jangle that the defiance of “I don’t care who passes judgement on my reasons” was the only line to really hit on the first few goes round, and it’s actually pretty enjoyable on that level! Then the full extent of its bleakness tinted with hope slowly revealed itself and, damn, that’s some powerful stuff. The wrenching “This freedom feels a lot like treason” alone conveys more conflicted guilt than many a whole song could manage.
[8]

Alex Ostroff: A gentle midtempo number that’s a little too underwritten to hit me as hard as it could. Her voice is warm, though, and the fiddle counterpoint is lovely. Sweeney can pen subtly evocative lines, and there are some doozies here. “This freedom feels a lot like treason,” rightfully belongs in ‘Back to December,’ while “you can keep your pride and blame me, if you need to,” captures entire Miranda Lambert songs in a single line. Given her obvious talent, there’s no excuse for placeholder contrasts of better/worse, blessing/curse and lines like “trust me, it’s really bad.” Still, Taylor and Miranda have written clunkers in their time.
[7]

Michaela Drapes: My Texas homegirl certainly has all the right elements going here, namely a heavy dose of Dixie Chickishness tempering the serious, real-world-problem story, but the odd you/we/my perspective shifts in the lyric makes it confusing as to what’s going on here. Is he leaving? Is she? Are they going to give it another go? This ambiguity is so distracting. But maybe I’m just thinking too hard? That being said, “our love has died/but somehow we’re still breathing” is a stand-out moment in that mess; I wish the rest of the lyric was as consistently good, because Sunny’s got the voice to support a stronger sardonic turn of phrase — the kind that turns middling country songs into timeless ones.
[5]