Trying to find a picture of Reba McEntire that doesn’t look exactly the same as every other picture of Reba McEntire is a bit tricky, but here we go…
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Edward Okulicz: Since BC Jean, who wrote the song, isn’t going anywhere with her own career, it’s hard to begrudge her a few extra bucks from Reba taking her song around the block. And no mistake, it’s still a great song, one of the decade’s defining classics. Reba loses the vocal pyrotechnics, but this doesn’t diminish the power of its melody. The only problem is that it suffers in comparison to the version we all know, because Beyonce likewise infused it with genuine ache and hurt, and did it with power to drop you to your knees. Reba does a good enough job to make you think almost anyone could have had a hit with it. Which isn’t true, of course.
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Katherine St Asaph: The song choice isn’t as surprising as you expect; enough of Toby Gad’s songs lean soft-rock (think “Big Girls Don’t Cry”) that a country cover’s just a matter of switching out a few instruments. That said, while Reba’s likable enough, in strong voice and seems well-intentioned, it’s hard to see this as more than a genre exercise.
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Frank Kogan: I liked Beyonce doing this for how she kept smashing her smoothness and command into roadblocks. But it’s Reba who really nails the drama. I haven’t followed Reba from the beginning; have had a general but maybe incorrect sense of her being too stagy in her delivery. Here she’s almost perfect, rising in bitterness but rising in power too, her upper register trying to negate the hard truths of her lower tones. Not that these are my truths. I mean, if you don’t like boys treating you like this, search for boys who don’t. But then, a lot of the power here comes from chafing against restrictions that come from the song’s world, not from mine.
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Anthony Easton: I keep thinking of this as a correction of the masculine over-emphasizing that has occurred in country over the last decade. That she had to resort to stunt covers should say something about the paucity of writing for women in Nashville — which is a new development, and the opposite is often the case (I am ignoring Swift, who writes her own material).
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Martin Skidmore: Surprisingly (perhaps it shouldn’t be), this Beyonce R&B number works fine as a country song. The instrumentation is less appealing, to me at least, and Reba’s voice lacks Beyonce’s power and sense of drama, replacing it with something more wistful, but it’s still a likeable cover.
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Josh Love: I don’t mean to sound ageist, but this song sounds odd in the mouth of a 55 year-old, and not just because Reba has to sing the line, “I’d kick it with who I wanted.” She delivers a game effort, but the sterile arrangement doesn’t do her any favors.
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Jer Fairall: I’m generalizing horribly here, but R&B — even the heart-aching, I-Will-Survive female-voiced sort — feels at home with bravado, resilience and fierce independence, which is part of what made the fragility of Beyonce’s original so unexpected and effective. Country — especially the heart-aching, I-Will-Survive female-voiced sort — has no problem the kind of broad emotional gestures (different from the ones that R&B favours) that allow vulnerability to trump bravado, resilience and fierce independence, at least in the moment, recognizing the others as things that might eventually lay somewhere down the road. A country cover of this song, especially one from a veteran who we can assume has crossed this particular bridge many times over in the past, feels too on-the-nose in its sentiment, and a little too much like playing dress-up in its delivery, no matter how professionally it’s executed.
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Alfred Soto: The use of Reba’s duskier hues is the first shock. The next, although not as pronounced, is hearing this prim lass sing, “I drink beer with the guys and chase girls” with the kind of assurance that Beyoncé has to rent. Sure, McEntire’s been phony often, but she’s been around long enough to distinguish between ersatz and truth, especially when novelty mediates.
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Chuck Eddy: A brave record — crossing genders while it crosses genres — and a really effective one. Interesting that Reba’s been rocking out more in her middle age, but on All The Woman I Am, I wound up liking three non-rockers (this one, “The Day She Got Divorced” — which always makes me think of Abba’s “The Day Before You Came” — and maybe “When Love Gets A Hold Of You”) more than the album’s three obvious rock tracks. Maybe Reba’s voice by nature makes boogie seem stodgy; truth is, her voice tends to bug me in the first place. Still, amazingly, in the past couple years, long after I’d written her off, I’ve liked her more than I had in decades.
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