Take a minute, girl, come sit down, and tell us what’s been happening…

[Video]
[6.22]

Alex Clifton: “Girl” is a pep talk that you give yourself in the mirror while your life breaks apart. It’s the feeling of having sobbed into a pillow for ten minutes and not really wanting to get up, but knowing you have to because you have things to do, and being annoyed with yourself for having emotions in the first place. It’s the quiet voice in the back of your mind that reminds you to treat yourself like a friend, console yourself with kindness instead of wearing down another anxious path. It’s the relief of drinking a cup of hot tea as you sit on the edge of your bed, trying to regain your breath while hoping no-one heard you cry. Morris makes no guarantees in the song other than “everything’s gonna be okay,” and that’s the only kind of promise I can hope for, to be honest. I don’t need any empty promises that will only fuel my anxiety and depression further. Instead, I want to know, right now, that one day I’ll be okay again.
[8]

Stephen Eisermann: Maren Morris never fails to deliver an impassioned vocal. “Girl,” her latest effort, is no different on that end, but is extremely different when compared to her other singles. The confidence of the girl from “Rich” and “My Church” has evaporated, and we aren’t left with a woman singing to remind herself of her worth. It’s certainly impressive, but the vague lyrics just don’t resonate enough to give the song the necessary power to overcome the platitudes, so what’s left is a well-sung song that aims for anthem and lands at corny.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: A massive Shania Twain/Mutt Lange blimp of a song, except it’s too cumbersome to manage even an Up! exclamation point, let alone take flight.
[4]

Danilo Bortoli: In a piece for his (sadly) long-extinct Poptimist column, Tom Ewing pondered on the then recent wave of life-affirming, self-empowerment pop involved in songs such as Lady Gaga’s “Born this Way”, P!nk’s “Raise Your Glass” and Katy Perry’s “Firework” released in 2011. The trend was there to see: the difference between previous iterations of the life-affirming sound in pop and (for instance) Lady Gaga’s gay pandering is represented, obviously, by the internet, the place where the individual (social media) meets the universal (Jodi Dean’s notion of the “blogipelago“), culminating in those songs being plastered in what I call the postcard effect: by sending a message to everyone who wants to accept it, it reaches nobody specifically. Eight years in, that diagnosis is still standard and rings true: in an interview about “Girl,” Morris admitted early drafts of the song started out as a private conversation between friends and then moved on to becoming “like a tough-love call to action in a sisterly way, to myself.” Yet calls to action move necessarily outward. Inner voices become anthems as universal as they can be. And anthems are effective, you see. The problem with Morris’s “Girl” is one of scale: the only way to confer meaning to all the vague signifiers is by the means of catharsis, the emotional outpouring she can’t simply generate. Which is to say, “Girl” works fine as a message from Morris to herself, but cannot get through past her experiences and into the listener’s perspective.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: The guitar riff that opens and underpins “Girl” is so distinctive, you’re not gonna mistake this song for anything else on country radio. Yeah, it’s co-written and co-produced by pop maestro Greg Kurstin, yet between its tempo — very slow, though this isn’t a ballad — and the lyrics and vocal from Morris, no one’s gonna mistake this for anything but country. There’s definitely an element of “I can make this and it’s country no matter what you’ve got to say about it” here, and there’s also a strong empowerment message here, actually from a woman as opposed to, say, the well-meaning Keith Urban — which feels directed in part at country radio programmers, which I’m more than good with. And they can’t ignore this, the lead single from a sophomore album destined to be as big as Morris’s debut.
[8]

Crystal Leww: Anyone who thinks that country music hasn’t had its share of feminism throughout the years just doesn’t know country music, but commercial country music over the last decade has shifted hard to the Florida Georgia Lines of the world. I find capital F Feminism to be exhausting from any genre, but Morris has more than earned her right to put out one of these. Hero was an incredible debut where Morris was allowed to be powerful and bitchy, messy and sad, complex and complicated. “Girl” was co-written with Greg Kurstin and Sarah Aarons, who are known for their pop songwriting and have the subtlety of a bear riding a bicycle. But it kinda slaps — reminds me of a country pop version of “Independent Women.” Fitting that this evokes Beyoncé — that bridge is basically “Halo” after all. 
[8]

Tim de Reuse: The real star of the show is the unyielding three-note melody in the guitar, and the unresolving chord progression that traces out circles underneath it. It’s the perfect platform for an “it’ll be all right” tune: no grand gestures, no bombastic climax, no particular pattern of tension and release — a reassuring sense of forward momentum and a spirited but tender performance from Morris. If anything, I wish she’d scaled back a bit on the vocal flourish and let the track sprawl out more organically.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Greg Kurstin has helped a lot of records I love, but his Flinstones Vitamins approach to pop sound hews too closely to the industry idea of how developing artists should “evolve.” The success of “The Middle” mean that Maren Morris had to go big. The cymbal and drum at 0:25 signal the bigness to come. Not a powerful singer, Morris and Kurstin rely on multi-tracked vocals to sustain the nyah-nyah sarcasm. What does “Girl” cohere into? A rather solemn approximation of what she did more effortlessly on “Rich.” 
[6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Living life can sometimes be the most unbearable of tasks. Every now and then, there are moments where you look back on how you’ve managed to survive day after day after day, and — if you stumble upon the most fortunate of moods — things seem like they’ll be all right. When I listen to “Girl,” the simple guitar melody is akin to readings on EKG machines. The high note that appears every two measures recalls the monitor’s incessant beeping: a constant, mocking reminder that you’re actually alive. Maren Morris’s lyrics are Instagram caption-levels of inspiring, and they only exacerbate any dissonance one feels upon hearing its forced uplift. And yet, it’s these gentle messages of self-worth and resilience that can mean a world of difference in the most unexpected moments. As “Girl” progresses, the guitar line gets buried underneath a robust arrangement of instruments, its heart beat melody suddenly sounding like it’s part of living, breathing flesh. It ripples into a spritz of delay-pedal flurries in the outro: a loving affirmation that you’re actually in bloom.
[6]