Lily Rose and Lee Brice earn middling marks.
“Let You Know When I Get There”
Lily Rose
Written by Hunter Phelps, Ben Stennis, and Michael Tyler
She still hasn’t come up with a distinct sound– you could have slapped the name of a good two-dozen radio acts on this exact production and never have told the difference– but this is still Rose’s best single to date. She sounds less strident in this setting than on some of her previous efforts, since she’s focused on telling a story rather than just posturing.
The song itself is actually pretty good for what it is. Its use of familiar tropes is so obvious that the twist in the third verse doesn’t even need a spoiler alert, but there are some details sprinkled throughout (“I’ll be that red bird outside your window,” is a line that lands especially well) to elevate it at least a little. Rose’s understated delivery helps, too. She knows when to lean into her natural drawl (“How ’bout them Dawgs”) to emphasize a point.
Radio had already dug in its heels when it comes to Rose, and I’m confident PDs aren’t going to risk having a subset of loud-and-proud MAGA listeners in the year 2025 scream at them about “DEI.” So this surely won’t be a breakthrough hit the way it probably ought to be.
But if Jelly Roll did a note-for-note cover of this without changing a single thing about the production? It’d be a multi-week #1. B-
KJC: As Jonathan notes above, this song has such an obvious third act twist that it doesn’t even qualify as a twist. The only question is how well it will deliver the inevitable “Oh wait, now they’re gonna be dead” element in the finale.
And it lands with a thud, perhaps because the character development was so thin all along that I never got attached to anyone in the first place. At least it’s all tastefully done. C
“Cry”
Lee Brice
Written by Dallas Davidson, David Garcia, and Ben Hayslip
KJC: And there’s something to be said for good taste, which has a direct correlation with an artist understanding their limitations.
Lee Brice is so blissfully ignorant of his talent’s outer boundaries here that he gives a spectacularly awful vocal performance, which in recent memory is rivaled only by Eric Church’s painfully terrible charity single.
I understand that there isn’t much money to be made these days in the studio, but where was the producer to stop this mess? Was there nobody in the room to step up and say, “You sound horrible. Try again” to a decent singer punching well above his weight?
This is T.G. Sheppard trying to be T. Graham Brown, and it’s a hot mess. Do better, Nashville. D
JK: I can definitely get on board with the idea of a pop-country song that confronts stereotypes of performative masculinity that have taken the genre in some gross directions ever since The Chicks were sent into exile. The simplicity of the lyrics on “Cry” actually works in the song’s favor: There’s not any real attempt to dress these ideas up in any poetic flourishes, it’s just addressing the stereotype head-on for what it is. “Who says a man don’t cry / Somebody done told you a lie.” Well, all right.
The production on this is super 80s country. It’s slick to the point that none of the country instrumentation sticks to it, with multi-tracked vocals and obvious drum machine percussion, and somewhere Dan Seals and Ronnie Milsap are nodding in approval. It works as homage to that era, but I’m hoping that it’s not indicative of any larger trend in that regard. A one-off reminder of this sound is plenty.
Brice, for his part, works up a pretty good bluster. As he tends to do, he over-sings the chorus in a way that makes it sound like his adenoids are bleeding, but he’s singing about being in pain, so it kind of works in context. This one’s a pleasant surprise, in that I rarely have much use for Brice, and there’s actually something sticky to “Cry.” B+
Leave a Reply