Single Review: 'Drink to that All Night' – Jerrod Niemann
12 years ago Liv Carter Comments Off on Single Review: 'Drink to that All Night' – Jerrod Niemann
Songwriters: Brad Warren, Brett Warren, Derek George, Lance Miller
Jerrod Niemann wants to be different from everyone else, and that’s usually not a bad thing. His previous album, Free the Music, was a sonic experiment which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. But the lead single from his upcoming album, ‘Drink to that All Night,’ is hopefully not at all representative of that new collection.
There is nothing wrong with songs that don’t aspire to anything beyond ‘hey, let’s have a good time and dance.’ That’s not what’s wrong with this song either. The problem is the lazy use of the current redneck music tropes by songwriters the Warren brothers, Lance Miller, and Derek George. There’s the unoriginal (and actually quite meaningless) description that it is “the kind of party makes you throw your hands up high”, the disregard for basic grammar, the appropriation of urban language (“everybody in the ATL is comin'”), and of course the casual sexism and general bothering of women (“workin’ on the sweet thing sittin’ on a bar stool.”)
Just like it’s ridiculous to lambast all truck songs, it’s also silly to dislike all party songs. But if we could just start by refusing the ones that merely repeat those cliches, please.
Niemann is a good singer, but on the verses his voice is altered inexorably by Auto-Tune for purposes unstated. More trying to sound like the cool kids in the cities? With co-producer Jimmie Lee Sloas, he built an arrangement that all but the most generous will not wish to associate with ‘country music.’ That in itself doesn’t have to be a problem, if the song is great, but underlying all the hip sounds and beats is a song that’s just not very good. I respect the creativity of Niemann and Sloas, and the exploring of boundaries, but I do not respect this song.
Liv Carter
She holds several certificates from Berklee College of Music, and a certificate in Positive Psychology from UC Berkeley.
Her main influences are coffee, cats, and Alexander Hamilton.
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