Thanks for sticking with us during the Great Outage of 2025! Luckily, after we’d been gone for a while, we happened to see a billboard advertising some repairs….
Will Adams: Chappell’s ear for giant pop hooks and predilection for the theatrical allow her to go all in on a concept. We’re doing a country song? We’re doing a fucking country song. That means banjo and fiddle and a na-na-na breakdown and cowboy interjections and a tasteful drawl, all at a tempo suitable for an internet-friendly line dance. In another artist’s hands, “The Giver” would seem like a lark, or even a cynical cash-in on country’s recent surge in popularity. In Chappell’s, it’s another example of her commitment to the bit, an elaborate costume where every detail matters.
[7]
Aaron Bergstrom: Nobody commits to a bit like Chappell Roan. “The Giver” feels like she went to Spirit Halloween looking for a Shania Twain costume, but all they had was a knockoff labelled “Singing Farm Woman.” She’s gonna make it work, though.
[7]
Joshua Lu: The country styling of “The Giver” is the first indicator that Chappell Roan is aiming for something new, but the attitude is what really marks this song as a departure from her previous work. Gone is the desperation of her biggest bangers; here rises Confident Dom Chappell instead, happy to provide a good lay without worrying about anything else. Her assuredness, though, gives way to a remarkably weak chorus that starts with half-assed vocals before hitting a career-low lyric of “take it like a taker.” The soaring hook of “I get the job done!” provides a bump of genuine mirth, but it’s not enough to lift up so much dead weight.
[5]
Al Varela: Unlike other pop artists who try their hand at making country music, you can tell Chappell Roan grew up with the genre. This is admittedly a very pop flavor of country music: the ’90s Shania Twain type that’s as much about catchy hooks and big personalities as fiddle and twang. Still, Chappell is having a ton of fun with the fantastic fiddle arrangement and cowgirl flaunting, and they give a Southern edge to her uncontested ability to pleasure women better than any dipshit cowboy ever could. Any debates or discourse you could have about this song mean nothing when you’re having too much fun shouting along, “I get the job done!”
[9]
Alfred Soto: Of course she channels Shania Twain, but she sounds more like Shania Twain than Shania Twain has, maybe ever. Those power chords and that fiddle chase each other silly around the room while Chappell Roan, making like a rhinestone cowboy, cares not a whit when her voice cracks. She, as she notes, gets the job done.
[7]
Mark Sinker: Turning ad copy into a metaphor for whatever you like, I guess. Fine if you’re in the right emotional space, but sadly the job I need doing right now is bookshelves going up throughout my not-very-new flat. The arrangement says she’ll do this swiftly and tidily, and the song-title says it will be relatively inexpensive.
[5]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Self-assured to the point of laziness, which isn’t a bad thing; her previous work reached extreme highs and lows on the strength of her charisma and effort, while this coasts along to a pleasantly trifling status. If “The Giver” was someone’s favorite Chappell Roan song I’d be perplexed, but it is exactly what it sets out to be — a ’90s arena country track, an unabashedly goofy use of fiddle riffs and corny jokes, a jock jam for one of the least jock-ish fanbases in the world.
[7]
Taylor Alatorre: “The Giver” could’ve misfired by aiming for one-to-one correspondence with Shania-Lange maximalism, a mode neither Chappell nor Nigro were built for. They instead go for a “local bar band covering Shania” vibe, and it’s a better fit for this kind of heartland ambivalence — campy in its staging, charmingly messy in practice, and guardedly sincere at its heart. Chappell uses country pop as the canvas for her punchlines, not as the punchline in itself, which some (including myself) might have feared. Of the two songs she specifically cites, I don’t hear the breezy reminiscing of “Chattahoochee,” but I do hear “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy),” one of the ur-texts of the “lifted truck” masculinity she’s prodding at. The fiddle part is a bit too high-pitched and needling for my taste, with its self-conscious rusticity placing the song in a constant tug-of-war between the honky tonk and the Target checkout line. What matters more, though, is the impulse to use a traditional instrument as an emblem of rebellion, something common to both Chappell and Big & Rich even if their respective “rebellions” are on two different planets.
[7]
Katherine St. Asaph: I’ve already written about this in [REDACTED], so I’m going to hand off this review to my partner: “It sounds like it’s interpolating ‘Centerfold‘ by the J. Geils Band — which is a dad-rock coded song about seeing a centerfold and getting really horny, and this is also a really horny dad-rock coded song, so maybe there’s a linkage there.”
[7]
Jel Bugle: Already decided that I’m not really a Chappell fan. This is a perfectly fine pop song that sounds a bit country-ish — I quite enjoyed the squeaky fiddle. A lot of things sound country-tinged; it’s gonna age badly.
[5]
Ian Mathers: I don’t think I love this a little less than “Good Luck, Babe!” or the first album because of the country trappings (they sound fine here). And it sure as hell isn’t the implied shots at us menfolk — as is usually the case, I’m sighing not because they’re unfair, I’m sighing because they’re… pretty fucking on target, and I wish more of my peers who feel unfairly targeted would actually do something to make them less accurate. It’s just that “The Giver” isn’t specifically setting me on fire like a bunch of her other songs. But I wouldn’t rate it lower than any song on The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, though, so I won’t here either.
[8]
Jeffrey Brister: I’m totally fine with my stamina being insulted if the soundtrack is this good.
[10]
Claire Davidson: It’s a credit to Chappell Roan’s pop wizardry that the chorus of “The Giver” was stuck in my head just a few days after she performed it on Saturday Night Live, long before it was widely streamable. I was reluctant to embrace the track upon its official release, thinking that the lumbering bass-and-guitar groove clashed with the more high-pitched combination of fiddles and Roan’s vocals that emerges on the chorus. But while I do still think those critiques apply, there’s so much to love here that I can hardly complain. The song’s lyrics could have easily fallen victim to gimmicks—to which country music is no stranger—but Roan’s cheeky references to the masculine posturing present in a certain stripe of bro-country are delivered with a confidence subtle enough to straddle the line between silly and convincing. I do wish Roan had included the spoken-word interlude she performed on SNL—”Only a woman knows how to treat a woman right!”—on the official track, but given that this is being shipped to country radio, I can understand not wanting to push too many buttons for an ultimately conservative crowd. No matter—I’m sure all the right country boys will be scandalized by the fact that a song with this anthemic a chorus is actually an ode to lesbian sex.
[8]
Alex Clifton: If “The Giver” had been released with no fanfare, this would easily be an [8]. To be clear, it’s a good song: it’s fun and flirty, it’s cool to see Chappell Roan try a country mode, and god knows the radio doesn’t have enough songs about cunnilingus. However, Roan played her hand a bit early with “The Giver,” debuting the song on SNL back in November. It would’ve made sense to roll out a studio recording shortly after that, but instead we had to wait until March. There was also a month-long advertising campaign involving billboards teasing the song. (Can you properly tease a song that’s already had a full-band performance?) I know not everyone watches SNL, and I’m sure there were many folks in the mainstream who said, “oooh, new Chappell Roan!”, totally unaware it had already been performed. But as someone who’s avidly following Roan’s career, the release felt anti-climactic. It’s not terrifically different from the live version, and it’s missing the awesome spoken-word bridge. Roan may be holding that back specifically for live performances, but if that’s the case, it would’ve been fun for her to debut it during later shows, rather than debuting it only to withhold it on the studio release.
[6]
Andrew Karpan: Perhaps the rollout was too much. Perhaps billboards on the highways of major U.S. cities to announce a three-minute song about hooking up in bar bathrooms create an expectation that is hard for anyone to fulfill, even with the last four decades of systemized pop rock radio programming at her fingertips. But maybe the everyday loudness is the point: a kind of figuratively and literal giving, a recasting of familiar language that fits deliberately into the larger, expansive Chappell project.
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: Giving is a practice that requires finesse. You have to be careful that you’re not too domineering, trying to levy your power over the other person to assuage your own insecurity, or too patronizing, trying to chide them into praise to assuage your own insecurity. Being secure in oneself is part of being a giver, cuz a giver will give just enough, even a little more, but never too much or too little. In fact, the way Chappell sings it provides the listener that sense of relief, gratitude and pleasure. Even the nananas surrounding the little lines from Dan Nigro and Wes Hightower (he of Neal McCoy “Mouth” fame). sound assured, confident and knowing. After all, she doesn’t need a map, she’s no quitter, she gets the job done. (And can unclog a mean toilet too! Even fix the leaks!)
[7]
Julian Axelrod: If we as a country can’t get a Shania-coded lesbian fiddle anthem higher than #5 on the Billboard Hot 100, the American experiment has failed.
[8]
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