Cowboy Hat ft. Great Big Beard….
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[4.14]
Anthony Easton: I have been hanging out with my friend Lucas lately, who grew up in Atlantic Canada, and who I met in Edmonton. We both are queer theorists, and do complicated academic work, but we still have a working class background. I was looking through his iTunes, and he had an enormous amount of Great Big Sea. I realized, between listening to CMT on the television while playing hooky from high school, listening to the radio during the grave yard shit when I was 22, and hearing rodeo bands, that my life in Alberta was infused with Great Big Sea, and that my life in Eastern Canada was almost entirely absent of them. I miss CMT and the rodeo — though that job was hell — and even academics in a studio near the Rue St Catherine can feel like family listening to the band over shitty laptop speakers.
[8]
Iain Mew: The message (gotta get down on Friday) is universal, but he doesn’t make it sound like fun. The revelation that he’s already thinking about Monday morning atonement is a telling one and seems to weigh down the whole song. The slow wheeze and the grizzlier vocals sound dredged up from the bottom of the great big sea.
[3]
Patrick St. Michel: At long last, a country song that doubles as a drinking song!
[4]
Brad Shoup: Ah, the communal bonhomie wafting from an Irish rock song. But it’s still a song about drinking with friends, no matter how loudly the bass drum protests.
[6]
Alfred Soto: I can find no evidence for my revulsion towards a collaboration producing this great big dumb hook; it’s the air of self-congratulation that I can’t abide. They’ve got the kinds of jobs that allow them to party with their mandolins and rhyming dictionaries.
[2]
Jonathan Bogart: “Tonight ain’t Monday, it’s Friday” is no “Tomorrow is Saturday, and Sunday comes afterwards.” Get the order right, at least.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: They have to know. There’s no way they didn’t know. There is no way multiple writers, singers, instrumentalists, label people, social media gophers all wrote/sang/gophered this and nobody heard, nobody pointed out that Myrtle Beach is a hellhole.
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