Rejected Rihanna titles…

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[4.33]

Katie Gill: At least this blatant attempt at repackaging small town America to be #relatable to people who’ve never had to drive the next town over to go the Wal-Mart doesn’t lean too hard on cliches. Instead, Trisha Yearwood gives us a slightly uneven mixture of her best-known 1990s country sound with the sound of the fifth single off a Carrie Underwood album.
[6]

Jessica Doyle: Like a mosquito bite, a sink full of dirty dishes, or the check-tire-pressure light in my car, it’s that omnipresent irritant: bland country lyrics! These at least have the unintended virtue of being so completely disconnected from any actual human activity that they end up collapsing in on themselves. The titular town doesn’t matter enough to even make it into the second verse, and since when does being baptized make you stronger? Isn’t it supposed to leave you weaker, as in temporarily stripped of all your inadequate human defenses and newly vulnerable to Christ’s glory? This is such dreck I’m way past being nostalgic for the sharper “She’s in Love with the Boy.” Y’all, I’m nostalgic for Florida Georgia Line.
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Alfred Soto: She’s worked on her undistinguished music like she’s worked on her Food Network show: few standouts, but the ingredients are fresh and convincing in their received hand-me-down pleasures. Imagine if Natalie Hemby had written her a song that calls upon Trisha’s power to evoke the glee with which an ordinary person accepts the accoutrements of success. 
[5]

Michael Hong: Thank you to Trisha Yearwood for making a big women empowerment anthem, something that doesn’t have to be set to generic piano balladry or a basic coffee shop acoustic guitar. She certainly sells the hell out of a line like “you got this baby” and both her voice and guitar give the track a nice edge even if it sounds like something you might have heard before, but when is country going to learn that you can empower women without having to define them as “someone’s daughter?”
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: I would assume there is at least one girl in that town who is A) lesbian; B) a late bloomer; C) even just too afraid of heights to go on the Ferris wheel (that one would be me); D) not much of a dancer, or a laugher; E) darkly alienated by Yearwood suggesting she compare the people traumatizing her to baptizers (a metaphor that is both sacrilegious and sometimes a little too apt). Which is all a very literal interpretation, but nevertheless if you’re a girl listening to a song called “Every Girl in This Town,” and get to a line that blatantly doesn’t apply to you, it’s jarring, maybe stings a bit, and takes you forever out of the song, because you know that it and its offered comfort are not for you, and if there’s anything every girl does know it’s the unspoken implications and expectations behind songs like this. And if that moral argument means nothing to you, there’s a commercial corollary: this limits your audience. Which is a shame, because it’s otherwise a brawny Martina-ish country ballad of the kind they don’t make much anymore, that a lot of girls in town definitely imprinted on. (But, y’know, not all of them.)
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Joshua Lu: Is this sis-country?
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