Luke Combs – Sleepless in a Hotel Room

It’s Dudes Tuesday! Dudesday!

[Video]
[5.12]Ian Mathers: The art of the music video has really fallen to the point of “official studio video”s that are just the marquee name looking at the lyrics on their phone and semi-emoting, has it? (The vocals themselves are fine, that’s not the point.) Presumably at this point Combs himself can afford to bring his family on the road, which makes the lyrics hit a bit more oddly than even the normal “oh no, touring makes me lonely” ones do. And I wish they’d rewritten the chorus so my brain didn’t keep thinking the title refers to the “you” in the line before it and not Combs himself. In a great song, none of this would matter. In a generic one, it all kind of adds up.
[5]

Claire Davidson: Judging by its verses, “Sleepless in a Hotel Room” seems to be aiming for unsettling atmosphere, with Luke Combs finding himself haunted by the specter of an old love in the liminal spaces of his tour stops. The song’s instrumentation here is appropriately eerie, with whirs of pedal steel floating across each ear, touches that evoke the feeling of sensing a spirit cutting across one dimension into the next. Yet the track abandons this cryptic subtlety right before the tension escalates, bizarrely sliding Combs’s voice into the back of the mix on the chorus, leaving meat-and-potatoes guitar to surge in place of his howling delivery. What’s even stranger is the millennial whooping that follows, turning what could’ve been a genuine foray into gothic territory into a ludicrous, jarringly dated singalong.
[5]

Alfred Soto: No bluster — he’s not singing as if he’s gargled on that wine he mentions, if not the wine glass. The whoa-whoas, hair metal power chords in the chorus, and okay guitar solo after the second chorus, are as close as he gets to horny loneliness. Better than The Other Luke’s “Hungover in a Hotel Room” anyway.
[7]

Al Varela: The bones of this song are really good. The drums are a bit heavy, but the chorus melody is memorable, the guitars and pickups give the song a grander scale that will definitely go off in concerts, and I really like the writing where Luke Combs feels the agony of being away from his family while on tour, even as this tour is meant to be to help them live fulfilling and happy lives. The problem is because he’s specifically trying to make this a big concert singalong, the song feels a bit too stiff and claustrophobic. It’s big, but not really soaring. Not to mention the distracting “woah oh” chants in the second half of the chorus, which show a lack of confidence in his writing. There are better songs on this album that are able to balance Luke’s strengths as a songwriter and a showman.
[7]

Charli Jae Brister: Some keywords: “towering”. That’s it. Another 3 minutes of extruded Country Music Product.
[4]

Julian Axelrod: The most interesting thing about this song is that it’s coming out five years after it was first teased on social media, leading fans to demand a proper release. (I didn’t know there were people out here trading Luke Combs snippets like Playboi Carti leaks.) Notably, Combs released a full video of him performing the song in January, filmed in a much nicer hotel. If you’re gonna drink whiskey and miss your wife, you might as well do it on high thread count sheets.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Bobby, Bryan, you did your best. Chip, you didn’t.
[4]

Tim de Reuse: The chorus’s insert-melody-here melody is bad enough. Rhyming “you” with “you” is bad enough. But I nearly spat out my drink when he got to the little pause in the line “Wishing you were kissing… me” like he forgot to work out enough syllables to make it fit. What’s the opposite of a text being overwritten? Underwritten? He didn’t write enough. There’s not enough songwriting in this song.
[3]