Mostly [6]s and [7]s… why don’t we just meet you in the middle?
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[6.50]
Alfred Soto: Responsible for several sharp singles without establishing a persona, Maren Morris returns with an acoustic chugger reliant on how convincing listeners will find the title pun. The town bores her, but she won’t burn it to the ground, not yet. Fear of hellfire may have something to do with it. Or the possibility that she’ll need a fiction of stability.
[6]
Leah Isobel: “Circles Around This Town” reframes ennui as a sign of of grounded relatability. It’s an interesting move. Country music demands authenticity, but all the external signifiers have been co-opted, so Morris builds her myth on an ineffable restlessness. She’s a cowboy in spirit, if not in practice. I like this.
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: “Circles Around This Town” is the kind of perfectly fine recreation of elder guitar driven country with enough day-glo gloss of today’s production styles to make it acceptable, but as a song in itself? Rather plain and dull, especially in writing. It’s meant to be an inspirational peppery potion, but it just feels a little too confident, especially since Maren is still in the beginning stage. And the low slung guitar dimmed in the bridge only reminds you that all of this is being played down, drums thundering below her voice keeping the guitar loop and occasional dips of slide guitar and violin in the chorus aloft. The power of Maren’s voice really helps the chorus soar, making the song float and puff up — then the verses slim down and thin out to prepare for the chorus, but instead it saps all the power of the chorus, which could actually prepare you to take on the world. A shame, every time the circle is completed the thin lines break it apart.
[7]
Alex Clifton: The lines “a couple hundred songs and the ones that finally worked / was the one about a car and the one about a church / that I wrote” hit different after the Swift-Albarn songwriting beef this week. It’s a testament to how hard but rewarding it is to make it with your own material in the music industry, especially as a female songwriter. The rest is a cute but rote story about finding success and keeping the grind up, but Morris does a nice job with it.
[6]
Thomas Inskeep: This remembrance of Morris’s early days in Nashville trying to make it is a delightful return to the straight-ahead country of her (major label) debut Hero; I love Morris, but wasn’t much of a fan of the more pop-soaked Girl. Imagine my surprise upon realizing that Greg Kurstin was behind the boards on this. Credit to him, a pro if ever there were, but also to the song’s writers, including both Morris and her husband Ryan Hurd, who know their way around a country song. What she’s saying and how she says it are equally important here, and the song’s arrangement is *chef’s kiss*.
[9]
Joshua Lu: Julia Michaels is credited as a songwriter, and it unfortunately shows a little too much; the lyrics are too neat and too squarely set at reaching the titular hook. Even the vocals are holding back, as if the song were designed for Julia — Maren’s voice, so effortlessly powerful, is made for something much more grandiose, and she should’ve been able to make “Circles Around This Town” into a sweeping cry like Maren’s best songs. Instead, though, we’re left with vocals that are weirdly filtered and distance, and the song suffers as a result.
[4]