Letdown!
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[5.20]
Mo Kim: I believe in music because I believe in its power to heal. With great power, though, comes the great responsibility of acknowledging that recovery is a hard fucking journey and “stay strong” means nothing when you say it with all the empty bravado of a script. “Fly” works because it draws strength from fragility instead. Maddie & Tae are the two friends sitting quietly by your side, grasping at the right words to fill raw wounds. Their harmonies soothe like a breeze on a bee sting, a band-aid tucked over a bruise; the band takes time with the familiar build from one guitar to an orchestra swelling in solidarity. This song has been done many times before, but it rarely soars like it does here.
[9]
Katherine St Asaph: Be suspicious of those who hailed “Girl in a Country Song” but have no time for this. Where Maddie and Tae’s last single was about girls in country songs — i.e. fictional characters — “Fly” is for girls in country towns, looking for solace from worse problems than chafing bikini tops, and more in need of big-sisterly ballads than industry parodies. Like early Taylor Swift, “Fly” is composed of hushed symbolism — the dirty dress, the heart a mess — whose meaning any girl older than 11 and younger than 18 grasps instantly. The melodic curve of the chorus is past familiar, way past cliche, and the run on “fly” no less familiar than it was the last time I heard it — but they take off and land lightly, without their radiomates’ Southern-bro bombast, and the high harmonies (see “lonely”) are genuinely pretty. I suppose you could stretch to find this cynical, but Maddie and Tae were girls not long ago, and amid so much actual cynicism reaching the sisters of the girls I grew up with, “Fly” comes off different: the theoretical girl-positivity of “Girl in a Country Song” put into heartfelt practice.
[7]
Luisa Lopez: It feels unfair to hound an artist with their first single when they’ve moved on, but the drop from “Girl in a Country Song” to “Fly” feels like a crack on the head. Not that kindness is somehow less meaningful than disdain, but kindness like this sounds empty, not even beige but off-color white, just a cluttered floor of easy sounds and things that were once a good idea.
[3]
Anthony Easton: I am disappointed at how generic this is, considering how witty and well-constructed their last hit was. I suspect “Girl in a Country Song” will be best thought of as a one-hit wonder.
[3]
Alfred Soto: Poignant because it was true and hilarious, “Girl in a Country Song” capped an excellent eighteen months for female country singers. “Fly” leaves no stone unturned in its mission to be as conventional as possible, from its fiddle hook to title metaphor. Reba McEntire might have said no thanks.
[5]
Iain Mew: The instrumental fills do quite a bit of emotional work, even if they’re very close to Taylor Swift’s “Begin Again”. That comparison highlights all the problems though — “Begin Again” is full of specifics and storytelling; “Fly” has a neat metaphor, but nothing to give it any emotional stakes.
[5]
Jonathan Bogart: Much more thoughtful and clear-eyed than an inspirational country song called “Fly” might be expected to be, it still never quite gets off the ground.
[6]
Micha Cavaseno: How you gonna fly when your song never bothers to get more than a few inches off the ground? “Glide”, “Hover”, “Drift”, “Sorta kinda go for it and just never get around to it, because who really cares, it’s just this song” are all more suitable titles. “Fly”? I don’t know, might be overselling it a step.
[2]
Edward Okulicz: Corny as anything, but Maddie & Tae infuse the song with enough lived-in aw-shucks country wisdom and youthful teen-pop earnestness to make it work. It’s a solid [6] elevated by care and believability.
[7]
Brad Shoup: I can’t stop hearing “Bleeding Love,” and it’s actually the sweetest part here. Turns out sometimes it’s not in the climb, it’s in the trudge.
[5]