Lea Michele – Cannonball
I came in like a cannonbaaa… oh, sorry, wrong song.
[Video][Website]
[4.00]
Alfred Soto: Boy, is she mad “Wrecking Ball” came first. Worse, she won’t be covering it either.
[4]
Andy Hutchins: No one wants to be a capital-S Star more than Lea Michele, which has been clear from the first episode of Glee, but I’m not sure anyone really wants Lea Michele to be a Star except for Lea Michele. She’s done herself no favors with this dimestore Céline impression over a relatively inert Stargate beat. I’m also skeptical of songs pitched as getting-through-it songs in the wake of Katy Perry having about 10 of them and more than a little grossed out by Michele maybe using a dead man’s memory to launch her career, especially given some of the dirt I’ve read. But the hook both doesn’t and does make sense: Cannonballs don’t fly; they just go as far as the cannon launching them sends them, then crash to earth.
[3]
Anthony Easton: Post the Vancouver Hotel Speedball, Glee‘s collapse was complete, and no one quite knew what to do. I have been incredibly cynical about Michele’s reaction to this mess, but not nearly as cynical as her complete ability to manipulate the situation in favour of her career. It seems to be working better than I thought initially. I guess you get points for chutzpah.
[4]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Pardon the caps lock but: “I THINK I FOUND THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL.” Now, Michele does not bellow this lyric from the first verse, but the relative restraint in her voice is something that will be missed — every lyrical aside from this inspirapop single will be linked to the death of her ex-boyfriend. Perhaps they are. Perhaps it’s none of our business to turn this into TMZ Music and to understand the artistic intent behind a song she will have to sing a good few thousand times to audiences over the world. To be honest, this is Michele ruthlessly coming for all that leftover Céline money with big vocals, big hair, cannonballs, lasers, the gun from Eraser, everything and anything. I can’t blame her — she knows her markets pretty well, from musical theatre to the vaguely Christian uplift displayed in “Cannonball”. I sneered at first, but finished the song nodding and humming along. Perhaps I’m impressed by her nous as a performer. Perhaps it was the song itself. Perhaps that’s better than satisfying our morbidity towards celebrity.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: Lea Michele doesn’t deserve half the vitriol she gets; professionalism is not a character flaw. The song, however, does.
[3]
Scott Mildenhall: Cannonballs are oddly inelegant things to base your emancipatory metaphor on. Fireworks, yes, they come with a bit of a racket, but they do offer a bit of spectacle; eagles, doves — there’s a whole world of birds out there to go for — but cannonballs are big, clompy things that just go “bong” and then do a bit of damage, if anything. Michele’s voice is far too polite for that kind archaic battle anyway, doubly let down by a production that she wouldn’t actually need more than a cap gun to knock down, library music for a Weight Watchers testimonial ad.
[4]
Patrick St. Michel: As someone who never really came around on Glee, I was surprised how much I enjoyed this… up until the chorus, when Lea Michele tries a touch too hard to sell those notes.
[5]
Brad Shoup: It’s mostly an exercise in technical yawp, but she does generate some nice harmonics. Sounds like she’s exploring every avenue of a Céline Dion pop impression, but Dion had that hair-metal ballad last year; the master is miles ahead. This sounds like Greek yogurt’s idea of inspiration. Still, I giggle when Michele tells us which is the breakdown.
[5]
Will Adams: There is an all-star team behind this song, but you would never know it. Not from Lea’s awkward rendering of the title into “can-in-ball,” not from Sia and Benny Blanco’s even more awkward “breakdown” hook and tired inspiro-cliché, and especially not from Stargate’s dated production, which isn’t even at the level of a demo for a High School Musical alum circa 2007.
[2]
Crystal Leww: Is Sia the new Ryan Tedder? Her songwriting credits for other people have mostly been popular but so boring; only Beyoncé (arguably) is able to salvage how syrupy and cliché her songs often are. “Cannonball” is not helped by Lea Michele’s delivery, which is exactly what you’d expect: like a Broadway star singing a pop song. Every word is over-enunciated and melodramatic. Even with the meaning and personal history behind the music, it just still doesn’t make for very good pop.
[4]
I was just listening to this song and then I Googled “lea michele thesinglesjukebox” just in case you guys had written anything. Lo and behold.
I pretty much agree with Crystal here: more than that, I just feel oddly unmoved. There is no struggle here, nothing for her to get over–everything, from the video, which is insufferable in how melodramatic it is, to the song, which tries to soar but gets bogged down in these sloppy THWAAAAACKY beats (I wish I could think of a better word but I can’t) is so obviously tipped in her favor that the whole thing basically feels like an episode of Glee. It’s the TGIF of inspirational pop ballads.
I appreciate Scott’s full bitch here. Great blurbs all around
Daniel, that Eraser gun is the coolest.
It really is. Eraser is a dumb movie, anybody remember when people were comparing it to Independence Day and people were wondering what was better? Sheesh.
Also, if anybody wants to read me quoting Scott Mildenhall (and gushing a little about “XO”), then I wrote an essay about this song and “XO” here :)
http://www.madeofchalk.com/poppourri-lights-out/
Bitchy is the last thing I’d want to seem! I just thought I was making valid criticisms (if you can call them that), but thanks.
And I really enjoyed your essay Moses, that line about the absence of darkness sums up a lot, gets to the bottom of much of the appeal XO has for me (lingering mortality etc).
Surprised and pleased that more of us mentioned Celine than Broadway.
the gossip stuff seems especially misguided — either you believe that all of it is bunk, or you believe that everybody is more or less equally cynical
see, i usually appreciate the cynical, this is just badly done cynicism.
@Scott M: Thank you for reading it! I had a lot of feelings about “XO” but couldn’t articulate them properly until hearing this. Sometimes it helps to have something to contrast something else with.
I’m glad Scott spoke on the titular conceit. It’s not as threatening as a bullet, I guess, and it still means something, and it works for pop meters, but there’s gotta be something else that holds together. Meteors?