Pretty blond hair, pretty bland song.
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[4.75]
Anthony Easton: American Idol being Nashville Star has maintained its consistency, much as nu-country is similar to old rock. This has some excellent energy, but could stand to be a bit more frantic, and might serve better if it was in first person.
[6]
Brad Shoup: Country songs about air travel better than this: Miranda Lambert’s “Baggage Claim,” Gary Allan’s “Right Where I Need to Be,” Willie Nelson’s “Bloody Mary Morning,” Jimmy Buffett’s “Somewhere Over China.” Not to go all Louie CK on you, but airplanes are magical things, and I expect a song about flight to reflect the wonder somehow. “Crying on a Suitcase” starts with a good groove and stalls on endless waves of ride cymbal. And the line “come on man, be a man” needed better phrasing. Or a total rewrite.
[4]
Alfred Soto: With Blake Shelton exiled to Zombieland, Nashville needs another burnished balladeer. From the solo to the earnest chug to the secondhand courtliness that comes off patronizing, this defines generic.
[3]
Scott Mildenhall: This is weirdly Robynian. Rather than telling the listener that all this stuff is happening, he’s telling himself. Seeing as he’s sat at home and probably not omniscient, he has no idea if it actually is. Songs often paint situations as being more cinematic than they might really be, but when the singer is only trying to convince themselves of that they offer a completely different angle. Maybe, if he bit the bullet and went to the airport, the destination wouldn’t be Hollywood. Maybe, similar to what could be inferred from Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend”, she wouldn’t recognise him at all – this could just be the internal dialogue of a deluded fantasist. And maybe, just maybe, that reading wasn’t what the writers were intending whatsoever.
[7]
Will Adams: Well, of course he has to run to catch her, since you talked his ear off in the wordy verses! It’s not clear what stakes Casey James has here. Why is he so intent in getting his buddy to play catch up? Is Casey himself interested in her? Is he just a good friend? And if there’s no buddy, and he’s talking to himself, why doesn’t he just do it instead of wasting time with all this talk talk talk?
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: I hate this trope. A woman who’s in the airport crying on her suitcase is probably a woman who arrived too late for the airline to check her bag. A man who skips airport parking and rushes security is probably a man who will be arrested soon. A sniveling ex is one of the few things that can make air travel worse, as is sap like this.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: Rushing for the airport legitimately is a frenzied situation, and you don’t need to throw in all the little logistical sub-elements of this particular problem to paint that picture. It shows that the songwriters have missed the forest for the little details in the trees. James’ delivery is workmanlike and while it’s just about earnest enough for the phrase “goodbye sky” to not come across as the clunker it surely is, it’s not bringing the words or the girl or the story to life here.
[5]
Josh Langhoff: She’s ’bout to buy a pretzel / Spend WAY too much on coffee / And once she starts the Jumble / She cannot be distracted… oooooh… / Now she’s collecting baggage / She finds left unattended / Maybe she’ll start a life there / Like Tom Hanks in The Terminaaaaal… / Which — despite its co-optation of “Jazz” as yet another meaningless character trait enabling Spielberg to Say Something Icky About Father-Son Relationships without actually telling us anything about such relationships or, for that matter, about jazz — I preferred to Lincoln… / She’s ’bout to buy a pretzel.
[5]