Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

Blake Shelton – God Gave Me You

I’m sorry I hung out with those sinners on The Voice, Lord!


[Video][Website]
[5.20]

Anthony Easton: The most explicitly religious song that Shelton has ever done doesn’t discuss the divine as an unknowable or interventionist god that is horribly generalized. The small details, and the explicit brokenness that begins the song, suggests a narrative of close relational power. When was the last time that chart country seriously addressed martyrdom? When was the last time — outside of certain corners of Mennonite/Amish/Anabaptists actually constructs eroticism as a martyrdom? The earnestness is a little much, and the bombast overwhelms, and his voice has been smoothed over — all of these things need to be noted. But the theology is much more sound than you see in other places. 
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: I can’t begrudge anyone their expression of heartfelt faith slash love. I can begrudge them not expressing it in any but the most simplistic, unimaginative terms possible.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: It’s so overtly Christian because Christian rock musician Dave Barnes did it first. Blake’s contribution was to pump up the guitars, ratchet down the key and clobber the original in sales. Someone more in touch with the church community will have to tell me whether there’s been a backlash to that; the answer will probably be more interesting than the song.
[5]

Alfred Soto: A squish like Shelton marrying the decidedly earthbound Miranda Lambert suggests divine intervention, and so does this hymn’s ringing 12-string hook. But Shelton, much better at midtempo yearning than uptempo bellowing, must contend with a pedestrian chorus.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Blake sails the high C’s of adult contemporary/contemporary Christian with a fidgety, keening song of devotion. It bursts and babbles with a winning sense of momentum — by contrast, Dave Barnes’ original feels like running through a snowstorm — but the phrases “love’s great martyr” and “flattered fool” are, respectively, troubling and kinda weeny. How will our Christian boys become men if they constantly jabber about how inadequate their women make them feel?
[6]

7 Responses to “Blake Shelton – God Gave Me You”

  1. Dave Barnes orginal is the answer to my original question. But I am not sure that it takes the idea of Martyrdom as seriously as Shelton does–because Shelton undersells it.

  2. Anthony, have you heard “Love Cocoon” by Vigilantes of Love? It’s a paean to marrieds’ eroticism from 1990 or so. The words got the group banned from CCM retainers for about a decade, amazingly. References to doom and shackles in that one.

  3. *retailers

  4. Aaargh I missed the cutoff, not that I would’ve contributed much beyond an unreasonably high score based on the fast version, which is about 20bpm faster than the slow version in the Official Video and on the album, not to mention Barnes’s original, plus it has a less insipid beat. It’s amazing how 20bpm makes the difference between sounding like all the other dreck on CCM radio, and sounding like one of CCM radio’s rare jewels, like Avalon’s “Testify to Love”. Though since you all might have also listened to the fast version, that hypothesis might only work for me.

    I like Barnes’s citation of martyrdom, but it has the weird effect of making me think he was trying for CCM’s “ambiguous You” and didn’t quite pull it off. Like, you can call Jesus “love’s great martyr”, but isn’t it unusual to say that of your significant other? But the rest of the song fits the spousal interpretation much better than the Jesus interpretation. So maybe Barnes just recognizes that every pledge of fidelity is also a pledge of death to what might have been, which probably makes this the deepest Christian love song since “How Can We See That Far” by Amy Grant. (Or since something I missed. Like Vigilantes of Love.)

  5. (or something less qualified than that)

  6. The video you linked is the version I was going off of. The opening guitar peals of Shelton’s are real similar to Bryan Duncan’s “I Still Love You – Simple As That,” which I thought was about Jesus for the first 10 years or do I owned the CD (which is great, for what it’s worth).

  7. is that really Shelton’s guitar? Nice.