Ella Langley & Morgan Wallen – I Can’t Love You Anymore

Closing out today’s collabs theme with perhaps the most inevitable one…

[Video]
[5.71]Al Varela: The Ella Langley and Morgan Wallen collab was always inevitable, and rather than pointlessly harp on what that means for Ella Langley’s politics, I was more concerned by how much Wallen’s presence was going to overshadow Langley just as she’s proven to be the year’s biggest country star all on her own. Thankfully, this song is unmistakably hers, with none of Wallen’s usual collaborators in sight. It’s a pretty great song, too: an agonizing moment of yearning for a relationship you absolutely cannot go back to, with both Langley and even Wallen delivering solid performances selling the mixed emotions over a really nice instrumental. I appreciate Wallen willing to actually play the featuring role to Langley’s success rather than try to make a meal out of the two biggest country stars of our time making a song together.
[8]

Alfred Soto: I’ve felt no urgency about reviewing Ella Langley’s album: disappointments crowd us. At least she sings with the gulped consonants of someone who’d rather swallow draughts of Marlboro Reds. She has a solid duet partner in the ubiquitous Morgan Wallen, whose most damaged songs he has co-inhabited with a ghost-woman whom he has traduced, abandoned, and, yeah, disappointed. The keyboard plinks, floofy drum sound, and supportive guitar fills add the musical support on which Langley and Wallen’s relationship can no longer depend.
[7]

Julian Axelrod: If this was just an Ella Langley song, it would be an [8]. If it was just a Morgan Wallen song, it would be a [4]. Together they land somewhere in between, and it’s fascinating to hear his heartland honk and her Chickenfry twang merge halfway into each other like a middle Animorph.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: P!nk’s “Try” is the breakthrough hit of Ben West, who serves as co-producer alongside Austin Goodloe and Langley on “I Can’t Love You Anymore.” “Try” itself is a earnest, open hearted song about trying one’s damndest to return to loving and caring for another without cynicism or fear or terror. But it’s very bland, dry and taut, a perfect song for a supernova of a singer like P!nk to sing, West and co-writer Busbee (RIP) not placing their own demands onto the words. But they are not the producers; Greg Kurstin sits at the boards. And in fact, it is that same bland, dry and taut sound that has captivated me before, but it doesn’t here, especially as it is a curdling of the once breakthrough statement that was once West’s calling card — but that’s Ella and Morgan — since the despair Alex Maxwell, Goodloe and Langley write feels more coherent and sincere than West’s tender sop to love, and thus he provides it with the demands Langley and Wallen had. But there is no Greg Kurstin to sharpen it into a needlepoint, so it weakly tries, then gives up, not even putting a moment of effort into the try.
[5]

Charli Jae Brister: Gothy New Wave flourishes in the guitar, feathery drums, so much reverb, thick and cavernous, way more melodramatic than the material called for, which is part of why it works. Everything feels a little pro forma when put together, though—those close-miked reverb-free vocals feel extremely plain against the comparatively saturated arrangement they sing against. But that’s more pedantic technical quibble rather than criticism.
[7]

Andrew Karpan: A largely whatever, whatever, whatever record that I found myself refusing to engage with, despite having developed a keen fondness for her last two big, broad gestures as mass communication. But maybe it is that I don’t think MW has been mass communication for a while, more speaking to a kind of fiefdom of sizable purchase power. The co-branding diminishes the product, even if it is largely her song, the touching Langley-ism of the taste of your cigarette seeming, to some extent, wasted.
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The top comment on the YouTube video for this song is “Just beat stage 3 lung cancer two weeks ago. So glad I lived another day to hear this beautiful song. Praise the lord.” With all due respect to all involved parties: there’s so much more to live for than this.
[2]