Hey, Lady A (play a song that’s being lam-bas-ted)…
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[3.17]
Leah Isobel: Country music for gentrifiers.
[2]
Katie Gill: I was super ready to link that Bo Burnham song and call it a review. Blue jean tux, drinking PBR instead of champagne, got no money so we’re out drinking beer in the country; this is pure pandering — Hilary Scott lives in a 7,600-square-foot, six-bedroom and eight-bathroom home. But THEN I looked up the song on Wikipedia and saw that it premiered on Songland, a show designed to give unknown songwriters a big break and help demystify the songwriting process. Does it still count as pandering if it’s written by a songwriter drawing on their own experiences but sung by a group that hasn’t experienced the song’s subject at all? But THEN I saw that Madeline Merlo, who wrote “Champagne Night” won the CCMA Rising Star Award and the BCCMA Female Artist of the Year and has been working in the industry for over seven years. Which 1. puts a big hole in Songland‘s claim that they’re designed for unknown songwriters and 2. makes me wonder if this is an industry vet writing something she knows will be a hit or a twenty-something drawing on her own experiences. But then I realized that I’m way overthinking this song that’s a [5] at best and I should just go take a walk instead. Is it shameless pandering? Possibly! Is it remarkable? Not really!
[5]
Oliver Maier: If you’re going to do the “Only Shallow” intro then you might as well just do a shoegaze song instead of trying to pull off ranch reggae. It would even come with the added benefit of making these lyrics indecipherable. You know what, here.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: We’re about three months away from “fuck you city people with your social distancing, we pack stadiums and bars and fight and fuck IN PERSON” songs, right? This isn’t quite there, but the necessary contempt is. Maybe it’s not fair to this particular song to notice how easily those velvet rope/”way out here where we don’t hear the highway” lines are repurposable, but that’s when I thought of it, because from institutional-grade reconstituted bro country, the mind wanders. Also, how bad do you think the Songland writer wanted to write “bottles and models,” couldn’t, but couldn’t give up the scansion? And also, Prosecco exists. Even, like, Andre exists. Even in the South.
[4]
Alfred Soto: I know not a person who held a champagne night during the peak of Zoom happy hours in late March through mid April, but the sheer mindlessness of Lady A’s city-baiting cynicism plays worse in the COVID era. Not that I give a damn about Charles Kelley’s praise for VIPs “sippin’ PBRs,” although I call bullshit on that line too; but I hear a cold glint in his and Hillary Scott’s vocal attack akin to a second-tier FOX News host turning into a human chyron on a Saturday afternoon. And Shane McAnally, for shame, scraped the lyrics from the bottom of a warm wine cooler bottle.
[1]
Alex Clifton: So Lady Anathema took a song written by Madeline Merlo initially titled “I’ll Drink to That” and “tweaked” it to fit their style. By “tweaked,” I mean literally none of the lyrics from the original made it over to the Lady Anecdote record — they saved the melody and then made it slicker. This isn’t inherently bad in itself (songs are re-written all the time) but had I not listened to what Merlo wrote, I’d probably like this more. “Drinking beer on a champagne night” is a stronger hook than the generic “I’ll drink to that,” but something about Merlo’s song felt far more like a party. “A blacktop road turns into dust,” a pretty image Merlo came up with, morphs into “and we go where we don’t hear the highway.” It’s not a bad change, per se, but it bores me. Lady Antagonism has churned out another rote summer drinking single, which leaves me feeling like Lady Apathy.
[4]