Garth and Trisha, Tim and Faith… Ryan and Maren?
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[5.62]
Thomas Inskeep: A gorgeous song about a relationship that can’t help but keep going on-again, off-again, made better by the fact that it’s a duet between a real-life couple — Hurd and Morris are married. Their vocals sound especially sincere and pair perfectly with the mix of pop production techniques and country instrumentation (that guitar sounds for all the world like Keith Urban’s). I know using the word here is cliché, but sometimes a cliché is the perfect fit: this smolders.
[7]
Michael Hong: Both Hurd and Morris have rough-edges to their voices that, paired with that electric guitar, give “Chasing After You” some gravity, the sense that love isn’t simply fate, but something to be fought for, earned. That said, it’s weird to hear the couple, married with a child, sing harmony about the other walking out the door on them, especially with how quickly they rush back into the chase after Morris’s verse.
[5]
Alfred Soto: They want us wondering, in that familiar way, whether the confessed anxieties are theirs. The sense of sharing their chastened lives with their audience undergirds the decision to sing every line together. That crinkly guitar riff does a lot of work, but I will not deny the commitment of Ryan Hurd and Maren Morris: his prissy regular-dude pipes are agreeable, while she depends on a late-song entrance to belt her verities. Some of them are well-put: “Every time you say we’re done/You come back to the love you werе running from.”
[7]
John S. Quinn-Puerta: Guitar melodies don’t translate to vocal hooks as well as Hurd would like, but when the track opens up and Morris starts to sing, it becomes something passable, and maybe even likeable.
[5]
Samson Savill de Jong: Who knew a duet with your real life wife could be so completely passionless? This slips from calm and mellow to soporific, and while I can see people enjoying this, I just find it utterly bland.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: I didn’t like “Two is Better Than One” the first time either.
[3]
Andy Hutchins: A song with this many gorgeous elements biffing crucial little things is close to musical tragedy. The simple guitar is sumptuous and the melody doubles beautifully as the vocal line, but it resolves much more cleanly over the first verse than the shorter second; it beggars belief that no one fought successfully against the asymmetry in the studio. Hurd’s voice is also perfectly pitched to this torch-lit wanting, rich and full without being too sentimental or showy. Morris, conversely, goes for something sharper, and the effect helps make that second verse an aborted attempt to steal the show and hampers the harmonies, which mostly find her swallowed up. The solution to what little is wrong here is there in the staggered vocalization of the first half of the bridge, too: Making a call-and-response or a finishing-each-other’s-sentences version of “Chasing After You” would’ve parlayed the contrasts in the couple’s voices into characters in dialogue and speaking the same love language rather than a lopsided duet. In fairness, what could have been near perfect with a tweak or three still goes down easy as is.
[7]
Mark Sinker: The complication on the Lennon-Ono marriage — I mean in our consumption of it as it unfolded as an adventure, a moral experiment, a countercultural promise, a commodity — was that in context there was often something very winning to the simplicity of its claims (“we’re just the same as you! freed perhaps from some pressures thanks to our recent hard-earned success! which you could achieve also!”) even as the self-absorption of the project seemed unsurmountable: this unspeakably wealthy couple making piano-driven pop-rock haikus from nothing but the tremors of their own tetchy inwardness. I know nearly nothing about the Hurd-Morris marriage — for example they can’t possibly be so rich! — yet the dynamic here does feel similar, if only because they open with a rococo little echo of the “Jealous Guy” melody, first as riff-hook and then as vocal. It’s vastly decadent to be making a lament (however slight, however provisional) from the fact they absolutely have each other and this works and they like it — because oh noes it won’t last, poor us, pity us, such hapless sexy babies. But if the plush self-satisfaction is aggravating, it is also something we surely most of us reach for and yearn for now and then: to be thrilled just with one another other, and untouched by the wide world’s grim harms.
[7]