Surely I’m the only one who sings that title like Stretch Princess…
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[7.00]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Sadly, Church is not offering more of the horns-thrown parking lot guitar heroics that made “The Outsiders” so entertaining, so go play that twenty more times if you want. Here, he’s crafting a universal tale about how our hometowns segregate after a breakup — a tale of geographical grieving, if you will. It’s conducted in broad strokes, like the moment when Church moans about being unable to frequent his local Pizza Hut — forget wanting a cooler detail of home, but does our man know they can deliver? The vast, booming melancholy is dorky, overwrought and — goddammit — so effective.
[7]
Brad Shoup: It’s a big song with a narrative attached, which is a key distinction. It’s crazy to think of Church at ACL Fest last year: tallying his JD shots, whipping out the metal riffs. Surely my pretensions aren’t showing — surely this is where his interest lies. He sets himself up for an all-time shitfit in the bridge but dials it back ’cause it doesn’t fit the drive-in size Weltschmerz he’s constructed from a half-dozen guitars and gigantic drums. He’s all over the emotional register, actually, but since the song’s so Bono it’s hard to notice after a while.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: Smartly written, from the arena chants making in-story sense (Eric is at a stomp-wild football game) to the conceit. The whole thing, on some level, is a dog whistle — “if you couldn’t stand livin’ here why’d you take it” is about the girl, but so close to “give me back my hometown” you sorta know who else it’s about — but it’s less obtrusive than some of its radiomates, and Church at least seems sincere and, on the bridge, cracks nearly as much as Miranda Lambert.
[7]
Josh Langhoff: So is Eric singing to the same woman from “Springsteen”? He’s certainly in a darker mood this time around. Springsteen’s “My Hometown” focused on the “hometown” part, but Eric (being Eric) focuses on the “my” — there’s no talk of race or economics or what this town might mean to anyone else. The people of Eric’s town have the good fortune to inhabit a psychodrama of loneliness. They wonder why he rises to his feet in the middle of Pizza Hut, eyes closed and arms outstretched, twirling slowly while those delicate high notes pour from his mouth.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: When Eric Church stretches up to a higher note, he sounds like a country-singer version of Big Bird. So nostalgia suits his voice to begin with, but he’s smart about how he deploys specific but broadly relatable images to tap into his audience’s various nostalgias. “Give Me Back My Hometown” is both fantastic-sounding record and cheaply manipulative — the build from the gentle plucking of the intro to the clap-and-march middle section is high-fructose cornball, and the anthemic “wooh-oh-yeah” is a retread of the “whoa-whoa-whoa” from “Springsteen.” But it’s also a worthy successor; appeals to nostalgia are cheap most of the time, and I’ll believe it coming out of someone who seems to believe it as much as Church does.
[8]
Scott Mildenhall: “Give me back my hometown; ’cause this is my hometown” takes some beating in the uninspired end to a couplet stakes. It’s representative of the song as a whole, though — if your nostalgia is so strong, how have you made it sound so dull?
[4]
Alfred Soto: So-called blue state residents often ask “If you couldn’t stand living here why’d you take it?” about people like Eric Church. Like the Miranda Lambert of “Famous in a Small Town,” the defensive Brad Paisley in “Southern Comfort Zone,” indeed, the Church of “Springsteen” and “Carolina,” the Church of this new song can’t resist mounting hand claps and massed choruses to prove he has a right to delineate the terms of his art, which means exploiting a well-trodden ambivalence with a pinched drawl. He barely gets away with it now because he exploits a well-trodden affection for him and because “Outsiders” was a sop to the Bon Jovi fans in his audience.
[7]
Anthony Easton: This, with the complicated percussion and almost mournful wooing, is anthemic, but I wonder whether these country anthems about hometowns require being far enough away to have a relationship that is filtered through a narrative construction. I don’t think Church and his songwriters have been in their hometown for a long time, and I don’t know if the Carveresque details of something like “Homecoming” by Tom T. Hall can be recorded anymore. This might not be fair, because Tom T. Hall is a better writer than almost anyone, but I am on the fence about how concrete this is. (Listen to this Joe Henry cover to find a brilliant example that has the same prairie wind whistle. I wonder if Church is stealing?)
[7]
Patrick St. Michel: There are two details in this song that stick like pins. The first is about the failed pep-rally at Pizza Hut, a seemingly LOL-worthy moment for anyone who get kicks out of reading Yelp reviews for eateries in small cities. Yet that red-roofed chain is full of memories (and now pain) for Eric Church’s narrator, and Church paints a better picture of this community than any cliches about dirt roads and streams. Second comes when he bares his teeth a bit more and tells her she can keep all the physical things, because he could care less about nostalgia. What he really wants is the ability to move on without being stuck in the past, and it makes the extended outro all the more powerful.
[8]