Single Review: ‘Sure Be Cool if You Did’ – Blake Shelton

12 years ago Liv Carter 2
blake shelton sure be cool if you did
Warner Bros. Nashville

Songwriters: Nicolle Clawson, Jimmy Robbins, Chris Tompkins.

Blake Shelton is preparing a new album and the project’s first single is ‘Sure Be Good if You Did.’ Let me start by saying that I hope this isn’t representative of the rest of the record.

In the song, a guy talks to a pretty woman at a party and promises ‘a night you’ll never forget’ (which obviously also involves his Chevy truck). The writers have actually done a decent job with a premise this overused. They stray not an inch from the current lyrical template, manage to get in phrases like ‘take a back road,’ but do so quite cleverly. Once again, it is the production that drags this whole thing down.

How much you like this single is probably directly related to how much you liked ‘Over.’ A first single should get you excited about the upcoming album, but Shelton and his team could not have played this any safer. They’ve gone for an R&B-influenced downbeat production, they’ve got the finger-snaps, the processed vocals, everything that’s required to perhaps get that cross-over to pop radio. But they forgot to infuse it with a little bit of soul and it all ended up sounding quite boring. A decent song like this in the hands of a very capable vocalist like Blake Shelton should sound much more interesting than this.

Shelton’s popularity is such that any single is pretty much guaranteed a #1 spot, so why still release something this average and not take a little creative risk on a song that would really build excitement for the new album?

thumb-down-UCN

 

Liv Carter

Liv Carter

Liv is a career coach for creatives, and the people who work with them.
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.
Liv Carter

Latest posts by Liv Carter (see all)