Honey, we’re not good…
[Video][Website]
[2.58]
Alfred Soto: Man alive, the mixing board hysterics just to s(t)imulate hysteria.
[2]
Katherine St Asaph: The precise sound of autotuning constipation.
[1]
Lauren Gilbert: Within the first five seconds, I’m concerned Grammer might be being strangled in the studio, and the song doesn’t improve from there. This sounds like “Honey, I’m Good” crossed with OneRepublic with accents via “Uptown Funk”, as sung by someone with a bad cold. It also boasts a collection of cliches as lyrics — “I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life”, “all my dreams are coming true”, and “I’m feeling blessed with all this love”, just to list a few. Indeed, it feels like the song form of #blessed, calculated to be “feel good” and “inspiring” and only managing to be incredibly annoying. Andy Grammer might think it’s “good to be alive / right about now”, but if being alive means listening to this song, I’m less than convinced.
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Andy Hutchins: Not in a world where a guy who seems intent on stealing every melody from “Cotton Eyed Joe” is allowed to continue his reign of terror, it’s not.
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Thomas Inskeep: I didn’t think he could get worse than “Honey, I’m Good” – and then he started talk-rapping. Seriously, you guys, this makes Rednex sound pretty awesome, which is a feat. Whoever produced this needs to have his/her 808 melted down. Pertinent, tells-me-everything-I-need-to-know line from Grammer’s Wikipedia page: “[He] started as a busker on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica and later performed in the Viper Room.”
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Megan Harrington: Andy Grammer, with his resistance to categorization and reckless abandon with hooks and breakdowns and their juxtaposition and rearrangement, has emerged as a one man Black Eyed Peas. I still feel a lot of affection for “I Gotta Feeling,” and maybe one day Grammer will find his nut, but “Good To Be Alive (Hallelujah)” is my brain on cheese grater.
[1]
John Seroff: ‘Cotton Eye Joe 2015 (Rednex version / YouTube Remix)’ feat. Mumford and one Son on newgrass signifiers and handclaps, post-The Voice Cee-Lo on aspirational choir / cloying optimism and Diplo… cause, you know, Diplo.
[3]
Jonathan Bogart: I knew my weakness for late-90s dork-pop CCM would come back to bite me in the ass someday.
[8]
Josh Winters: If all else fails, Andy Grammer would make an effective megachurch youth group pastor.
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Edward Okulicz: Grammer’s enthusiasm is palpable and somewhat contagious, and he’s clearly made a decision that if he’s going to do corn, this time he’s also going to smother it in high fructose corn syrup and stick corn chips onto the sticky outside. The modest cheese quota means it’s hard to drum up the same level of hatred as “Honey I’m Good.”
[3]
Brad Shoup: The wisdom of hindsight has proven me correct on “Honey, I’m Good”, so anything else Grammer produces is a cute footnote. He’s doubling down on the Hick Jonas thing: the programming is infernally stuffy. You feel like banjos were summoned and quashed by the same committee. The gospel choir made it through — it’s a touch I almost always revile, and it’s not different here except for the nerve required to cut them off so brutally. That’s something, I guess. He’s discovered how to be pop, but a second pop song eludes him.
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Will Adams: An endurance test of suffering through just about every pop genre imaginable smashed together and saturated to oblivion. Yes, it’s terrible, but at least it’s a different kind of terrible than “Honey, I’m Good”…?
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