Scotty McCreery ft. Hootie and the Blowfish – Bottle Rockets

Still time to own the night like the Fourth of July?

[Video]
[4.36]

Al Varela: An absolute snoozer from an otherwise talented artist. The most generic pop country chords you can think of paired with drums that are way too loud and a cheap cameo from Hootie and the Blowfish who are just here to sing one of their own songs as the punchline to the hook. Which would be cute if Cole Swindell didn’t already do this better with “She Had Me At Heads Carolina.” But that song also painted a much more vivid picture and made the referenced song feel that much more special as the song that had Cole Swindell smitten with this stranger. Scotty McCreery, as nice as his voice is, doesn’t have that same passion and wonder. To me it sounds like safe, easy nostalgia bait after his previous album’s singles underperformed. Because Nashville would rather have its artists cater to basic commercial trends rather than allow their artists to actually make good music. 
[3]

Tim de Reuse: As a vocalist he’s more grating than ever, overselling his twang to a degree that only makes him sound insecure in his own Country credentials; personally, if I sounded like that, I wouldn’t have invited the much more talented Darius Rucker to remind everyone what a decent southern-accented vocalist sounds like. It’s moot, of course, since this track was written to be stripped of vocals and licensed to the background of a commercial for antihistamines.
[2]

Ian Mathers: I am fully aware that there are people with voices that sound like McCreery’s without deliberately aiming for it for effect — probably the same is true of RP or any other particularly aesthetically/socially/politically significant accent. But in this context when anyone starts singing and they sound like that, it just feels so… fake, targeted. Match that with a “ft.” credit that’s a new nadir in the interpolation games, and I would just rather not.
[2]

TA Inskeep: Scotty McCreery has a great voice, so richly deep, and it’s used to fine effect on this song from the “Kenny Chesney 2004” file of reminiscences. Don’t forget, most of those songs did so well back in the day because they were so good. (Chesney in the Country Music HOF for good reason.) Darius Rucker obviously also has a great voice, and hearing him and his Blowfish re-playing and -singing “Hold My Hand” here makes all of the sense. When McCreery and Rucker sing together at song’s end: yes, yes, yes. This just might end up the defining song of McCreery’s career.
[8]

Dave Moore: It’s McCreery on vocals and Hootie et al. coming in to splice in a nostalgic chorus (Tim Robinson voice: “I don’t know if you’re allowed to do that…”) but I’d rather hear a Darius Rucker song where Scotty McCreery comes in to…I dunno, ding a triangle or something?
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: It does irk me to realize that Hootie are literally letting Scotty sit in with them and sing a version of his song with token “Hold My Hand” mentions so you don’t forget who it is that Scotty is singing with. It irks me even more that Darius doesn’t get a verse. It really irks me that the song isn’t bad.
[6]

Mark Sinker: Nothing is more magically romantic than being on a Carolina beach in the summer moonlight at firework time, just you and your true love and every single one of Hootie and the Blowfish.
[2]

Katherine St. Asaph: I have spent many summers on the Carolina coast and I call bullshit. Where are the spring breakers? The calabash seafood? The crossing the border in order to get the bottle rockets in the sky, given that they’re illegal in North Carolina? Such is the result of trying to modernize “Hold My Hand” via fake specificity. Low-effort slop, please study this map and regenerate.
[2]

Taylor Alatorre: I wouldn’t disagree if this song were labeled “cloying”; I would just say it doesn’t matter in this case. It didn’t matter when Eddie Money let us know how Ronnie sang, thereby birthing a piece of Boomer bait that managed to transcend its generational appeal. It’s okay to be cloying as long as one is thoughtfully committed to it, and can amply display evidence of that commitment. Part of the evidence here is just biography; McCreery and Darius Rucker indeed both hail from the “Carolina coast,” North and South respectively, which should at least help dispel the notion of a Gen X cash-grab founded solely on name ID. More pertinent evidence can be found near the end, when McCreery shows enough confidence in his own songwriting to merge his and Hootie’s choruses into an ad hoc mash-up, where previously they had been separate with one leading into the other. This actualizes the song’s impossible dream of past merging with present, of becoming “17 again,” and it’s cleanly executed in a way that is absolutely not guaranteed for country interpolations. It also furthers the song’s lyrical themes of connection and reciprocity, which doesn’t seem to have emerged by accident but would be even more impressive if it did. Check out those imagistic details in the chorus, specifically those which are reported not as simple sense perceptions but as reflections of one thing upon another: “bonfire in her eyes,” “moonlight on the waves.” Scotty starts playing “Hold My Hand” not because it’s his favorite song but because the girl made him play it, which not only lends her character some full-bodied agency, it mirrors the way that radio overplay and nostalgia can combine to essentially decide our adolescent tastes for us; you are, in part, whatever was saturating the airwaves when you were 15, and there is little sense in resisting this. 
[9]

Julian Axelrod: I have no history with Hootie (or the Blowfish) so I didn’t even realize this was interpolating an earlier song. But when Darius Rucker comes in on the chorus, I’m reminded how powerful and comforting I find his his voice, even without the nostalgic attachment. I wish there was more Rucker (evergreen critique) beyond those two lines, but it lends a familial backyard barbecue air to what’s essentially “guy takes out his guitar at a party and plays Hootie and the Blowfish” — a horror story in song form.
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: There is no style in contemporary pop writing that grates on me more than the nostalgic summer country song. There are, of course, good takes on this style — regrettably, Morgan Wallen has one of the best — but by and large these songs are utterly void of value, coasting on the vague appeal of the least controversial elements of the American experience. Here, at least, McCreery makes the broadness explicit, starting off by declaiming that “everybody’s got a summer they can’t forget.” Yet these songs make no additional effort to do anything with this nostalgia. It’s a completely inert force, evoking no greater well of feeling. The sound is equally anodyne, stripping away any interesting elements to the production until it’s a soft-focus mush. “Bottle Rockets” makes this all more galling, taking the slightly-grungy roots rock of “Hold My Hand” and turning it into the musical equivalent of a de-aged cameo in a late period Star Wars spinoff. Darius Rucker sounds a million miles away now, a ghostly Hootie Choir welcoming you to the great beyond. Let summer end.
[3]