The Singles Jukebox

One person is!

[Video]
[3.50]

Katherine St Asaph: Sugary Backstreet-ballad crooning, the chorus of “Timber” except trying to be serious, a line about some unspecified “bad decisions you didn’t judge” that pings my details-intentionally-left-vague radar — I do, indeed, roll my eyes at this.
[3]

John Seroff: Though somewhat better realized and less musically moribund than this week’s other “That’ll Do Pig” country ballad, Dan and Shay’s attempt to lower the bar is less moving than it is, well, simply extant.  Instead of this amiable walking treadmill, there’s probably a more interesting song with this title to be written about the experience of discovering that your vlog crush is more than an avatar and really just human after all.  
[4]

Vikram Joseph: “Glad you exist” is one of those early internet-era phrases that’s meant to sound cute and profound but which just sounds empty and trite; you can picture the sort of man that replies to a funny tweet with “You, sir, have won the internet today” whispering it in bed to his wife, who is pretending to be asleep. It’s a laziness that’s more than matched by the song’s vanilla, sub-Ed Sheeran strum and paint-by-numbers depiction of a happy relationship; the gulf between how self-satisfied this sounds and the amount of effort exerted is cavernous. “There’s a couple billion people in the world,” Dan and Shay assert, with wildly misplaced confidence — that was the world’s population in 1926, a year in which this still wouldn’t have sounded interesting.
[2]

Al Varela: At this point, I have no reason to expect more out of Dan + Shay. They found their audience in making the most middle-of-the-road cheesy love songs on the radio that women who watch The Bachelor fall head over heels for. But who said that has to be a bad thing? They struck out last time with the confusing mess, “I Should Probably Go To Bed”, but the breezy acoustic flutter of “Glad You Exist” makes me smile. 
[7]

Juana Giaimo: I opened the video on a separate tab and when the song started I thought it was an ad until I opened the tab and realized that it was the song. That’s not a good thing. 
[5]

Oliver Maier: Every Dan + Shay song sounds like it was written and produced in one afternoon maximum. I was ready to dub this “fine” until I became aware of that offbeat guitar chord ticking away rigidly in the left channel, and now it’s all I can hear when I play this song. The tropical house theatrics on the post-chorus aren’t as grating, just dumb and unnecessary.
[2]

Alfred Soto: When they bray about “secrets,” I believe not a word, even with their acoustic guitars, especially because of their acoustic guitars.
[2]

Andy Hutchins: Is this a distress signal sent in the hopes that Ed Sheeran will return to recording this wan approximation of joy and their careers? Can we pretend that it is?
[3]