No 9/11 references here…
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[6.17]
Katherine St Asaph: Demi tries so hard. She’s got no sangfroid swag, no airy distance, none of her chart friends’ restraint. She doesn’t sing her verses so much as splay her voice across them, loose with vibrato and overflowing its syllables. It’s her best vocal trait, though; she makes tracks like “All Night Long” crackle with desperation, “Skyscraper” with pathos and this with more gusto than its thuddingly obvious pun and Coldplay swipe perhaps deserve. I hope it’s healthy.
[6]
Brad Shoup: She’s off the rails in the verses — giving a goonish tint to phrases like “I called your cell phone, my love” — but it’s all about that antimetabole, and that chorus. That’s the place the generosity (or covetousness, depending on your reading) flashes its desperation. Gets me better than that string quartet.
[6]
Anthony Easton: All six points for how the melodramatic piano cascading into racing, melismatic vocals.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Lovato rescues a song from the blahs (whose bright idea was it to bury the piano?) with a wobbly technique commensurate with her emotional hysteria.
[6]
Josh Langhoff: The opening strings warn us this is serious stuff, that Lovato will employ the psychoanalytic tools of uninhibited vibrato and melisma and lip-on-lip action. She wishes this guy was so complicated; bet he’s got a chick on the side. But she and the beat are more poignant for their determination to break through to him.
[6]
Jer Fairall: When she reaches for a Kelly Clarkson-style melisma and fails, the song illustrates just how much better off it is in the hands of a considerably more limited vocalist. Clarkson would have strangled the effervescence right out of this thing, but Lovato, having dabbled in some not-so-well-advised melodrama of her own recently, is forced to let the song be the star here and it returns the favour with some lithe “Papa Don’t Preach” strings, a lovely piano bridge and a humdinger of a chorus. If the verses are the least memorable thing about it, consider them just a means of killing a few seconds of time between each of the song’s many formal highlights.
[7]