That’s right, it’s babyday…
[Video]
[4.94]
James M Errington: What I can find out about this song: Jamie is from Cardiff. He was on The Voice in 2017. He lives in Los Angeles. He’s signed to BMG. He’s bisexual. This song is big on TikTok. Jamie performed it on Strictly. This song is currently number one in the UK. This song is the first UK number one by a Welsh solo male artist since Shakin’ Stevens’s “Merry Christmas Everyone in December 1985. What I can’t find out about this song: What differentiates it from a thousand other inoffensive middle-of-the-road pop songs.
[5]
Ashton Arbus: I think there’s some kind of mixup here — didn’t we cover this song last year?
[3]
David Allun Jones: A bright MOR shuffle overflowing with eager-to-please energy, “Babydoll” squarely plops Jamie Miller in the Bruno Mars section of pop entertainer, more specifically Mars’ Doo-Wops & Hooligans-era brand of rom-com-supporting staples. And surely Netflix will have a ball with this one, squeezing every ounce it can out of Miller’s killer-for-karaoke wails, middle-school grasp of messy love and “Rein Me In”-nodding guitar shimmer in order to back a zillion future will-they-won’t-they storylines. It’s okay for now/sure to annoy me soon (honorable mention to the sax solo), but wake me up when Jamie gets to the 24K Magic and Gucci Mane-collab portion of his career.
[5]
Alfred Soto: I’ve lived long enough to have heard Bruno Mars’ vocal influence on a new generation of aspirational pop and not bad. Someone tell the kid that as metaphor “babydoll” went out with the zoot suit.
[5]
Jonathan Bradley: “Babydoll” is an epithet that spills from Jamie Miller’s lips with all the overbearing brio of Michael Bublé in original-contempo mode. Margarine slick, not butter smooth.
[2]
Ian Mathers: In retrospect, I was too harsh on Dominic Fike. The only good thing about this “Babydoll” is that seeing the title reminds me that the chorus from the other one wound up growing on me a little.
[3]
Al Varela: I have a very particular soft spot for this kind of pop song: overly sincere, smiling sweetheart music that isn’t quite teen pop, but wouldn’t be out of place with it. “Babydoll” in particular takes me back to some of my favorite solo Nick Jonas songs, and I’ve been sorely missing that from pop music this year. Jamie Miller’s sincere plea to get the heartbreak over with, because he’s so in love with this girl that he’s willing to even go through all the pain of her not reciprocating just for the feeling, is so cheesy and over-the-top in a way that shoots straight for my heart. Helps that the song has a jaunty atmosphere with its keys and glistening guitars. If that wasn’t enough, there’s a saxophone solo on the bridge! Swoon.
[10]
Lichelle: Pleasant enough — the ’80s throwback-sounding sax is a nice touch. I won’t run out of the supermarket or dental office screaming in audio-induced terror when this inevitably comes on.
[5]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: What I appreciated, over time, about the Sam Fender-Olivia Dean duumvirate that has ruled the UK charts for the last year or so was their relative restraint. The music was sanitized soul-pop made for grocery stores, but in thoughtfully muted tones. They did not seem desperate to be loved or brought into the easy-listening canon but were instead merely professional, a quality of facelessness that annoyed me slightly on first listen but that, across months and months of overplay, prevented any of their songs from becoming true irritants. “Babydoll” instead turns that irritating factor all the way up. Jamie Miller is mugging for the cameras on every second of this, his heartthrobbing voice threatening the listener with some simulacrum of a good time while overly plasticky daytime TV-core blasts behind him. Is it possible to get sick of a song you’ve only heard twice?
[2]
Iain Mew: “Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac was a UK #4 hit in 1988. Then, in 2013, it got used in a mobile phone service advert and reached the top 20. In recent years, it has been a perennial in the lower ends of the charts, most recently returning to the top 40 this summer. It is a familiar and popular sound without having broken through into being annoyingly omnipresent. So it’s a smart move to use its distinctive “oh-ahhhh” backing vocals to provide at least one distinguishing feature in a song that is otherwise all too obviously in a “Man I Need”/”Rein Me In” mould.
[4]
Scott Mildenhall: Astutely identifying that “Man I Need” could be less boring, Jamie Miller prescribes it the remedies of volume and pessimism. Diminishing his apocalyptic sentiments with dead-eyed gusto, he eschews unshakeable tastefulness for aggressive technical proficiency. In doing so, he breaks the sacred code of background music.
[5]
Tom Feckerdt: This is a pretty good song that I don’t like on principle. I simply don’t appreciate loud, capital-G Generic pop songs that exist to stuff the charts or fill up space in the background, and listening to “Babydoll” on headphones, you can hear how thin all the individual elements sound. But songs like this are a mildly tedious but necessary component in the pop music ecosystem. If they give you a kinda neat mini-hook to sing on your way to work, that’s always a plus. For “Babydoll,” that hook happens when Miller starts imitating the twirling guitar line in the background (“that someone’s gottabegottabe“). Excited to hear this again next year when it soundtracks Belly and Conrad’s newfound domestic life in the upcoming The Summer I Turned Pretty movie.
[6]
Charlotte Gaze: Have you thought lately about how beautiful the vocals of One Direction were? It’s one of those things you don’t appreciate until long after it’s gone. I don’t know anything about this guy Jamie Miller, nor do I know that this is an especially sophisticated bit of pop songwriting, but there’s one thing I do know, and it’s that this fills me with an abundance of youthful joy and captures an invaluable feeling I haven’t gotten from pop music in a very long time.
[10]
Andrew Karpan: A shiny and ornate vat of nothing, “Babydoll” is nonetheless evocative. Sometimes, one just yearns, for nothing really, and then proceeds to do absolutely nothing about it. A relatable experience, perhaps; ditto the sax solo.
[4]
Nortey Dowuona: Miller’s strong, billowing tenor combines the smoothed-over, wan recreations of superior pop perfection into one truly vibrant song — wait, how did it go?
[6]
Julian Axelrod: I’m not entirely convinced this is a real song.
[4]