You won’t need “Whiskey Glasses” to listen to this song, but you’ll want a few cups of coffee to keep you awake.
I’m going to level with you: I have absolutely no idea what people see or hear in Morgan Wallen. For my money, he’s a Tyler Hubbard knock-off who doesn’t have anything interesting to say, and he hasn’t done a great job distinguishing himself from the rest of country radio. However, the rest of the world apparently thinks otherwise: His last single “Up Down,”
a collaboration with Florida Georgia Line, not only became his first No. 1 single on Billboard’s airplay chart, but my (unfavorable) review of the song became this blog’s most-viewed post of all time (and it’s not close). The question now is whether all this buzz is just an FGL-fueled sugar rush or a sign that Wallen is actually an artist on the rise. Based on his latest single “Whiskey Glasses,” the third from his If I Know Me album, it looks to be the latter: The track is a generic, lifeless, woe-is-me-she’s-gone song that feels way more shallow than it should.
The production opens innocently enough, with the same old electric guitars and drums that everybody else is using. Halfway through the first chorus, however, this pulsing bass-like noise starts rumbling, and while it slowly fades into the background as the chorus arrives, it’s annoying and distracting enough that the producer might as well have stuck a fire alarm into the mix. The tone is suitably dark for the topic,but it doesn’t quite reach the level of sadness it needs to (to be honest, much of this is Wallen’s fault). The tempo is stuck in this weird place where it’s too fast to generate emotional energy but too slow to generate kinetic energy, and song just plods along lethargically as a result. There’s nothing here that really draws the listener in (in fact, that weird bass pulse actively drives them away), and in the end the only reason you start tapping your feet is because you’re impatiently waiting for the song to finish.
If there’s one thing “Whiskey Glasses” does, it demonstrates that personal, emotional songs are not Wallen’s forte. On a technical level, he’s a tolerable singer with both the range and flow to meet the song’s demands. In terms of charisma, it’s a different story: Forget making the audience feel the narrator’s pain, Wallen fails to even make me feel bad for the guy. His delivery lacks passion and sounds more matter-of-fact than anything else, and makes me question whether the dude has a pulse, let alone actual emotions. (I wouldn’t go as far as to say the performance was mailed-in, but it’s not far above that.) In the hands of a more earnest performer, there might have been some hope for this song, but Wallen just doesn’t have the chops to carry the mail here.
Part of Wallen’s problem here is that the lyrics don’t give him a heck of a lot to work with. Ostensibly the song is a lament over a lost love, with the narrator describing just how much alcohol he’ll need to mask the pain he (supposedly) feels. The problem is…well, there are a lot of them:
- Generic cry-in-my-beer songs have around a long time (consider that Hank Williams Sr.’s “Tear In My Beer” was written almost seventy years ago), and this song does little to distinguish itself from the pack. You can see where the writers tried to insert some cleverness via its multiple interpretations of phrases (such as the “whiskey glasses” hook), but it’s completely predictable and just makes the listener roll their eyes. (Seriously, I called the drink/eyewear use of the title before I’d even heard the song.)
- The narrator’s concerns feel beyond superficial to me. The guy doesn’t bemoan the fact that he’s lost his soulmate or best friend (heck, the word “love” doesn’t appear in the song at all), but instead whines about how he can’t sing karaoke anymore and that “she’s probably making out on the couch right now with someone new.” It makes you wonder how much of a “relationship” this relationship this really was, and it certainly doesn’t make you sympathetic to the singer’s lament.
- There’s a distinct lack of self-reflection here, which is especially glaring given the above bullet. The narrator offers no reasons for why the woman decided to leave (he doesn’t even bother to say “I don’t know why she left”), even when there seems to be an obvious reason staring him in the face (“How serious was this relationship? Did you ever talk to her about that?”). Instead, the narrator decides to drink himself numb, treating his symptoms without addressing the real problem.
- Oh yeah, and the bridge is the most annoying, unnecessarily-repetitive thing you can imagine:
Line ’em up, line ’em up, line ’em up, line ’em up
Knock ’em back, knock ’em back, knock ’em back, knock ’em back
Fill ’em up, fill ’em up, fill ’em up, fill ’em up
‘Cause if she ain’t ever coming back
Line ’em up, line ’em up, line ’em up, line ’em up
Knock ’em back, knock ’em back, knock ’em back, knock ’em back
Fill ’em up, fill ’em up, fill ’em up, fill ’em up
‘Cause if she ain’t ever coming backPlease stop, my ears are starting to bleed.
Add it all up, and you’re left with a whiny, clueless narrator and an audience who is completely uninterested in hearing his sob story.
In the end, “Whiskey Glasses” is a song about nothing: A love song without love, a sad song without sadness, and an emotional roller coaster delivered as flatly as humanly possible. Neither Morgan Wallen nor the producers nor the writers make a compelling argument for why people should pay attention to this song, and the things that do stand out seem to make the song worse instead of better. At some point, you’ve got to do more than drive blog traffic to hang around in country music, because otherwise you’re just wasting people’s time.
Rating: 4/10. Don’t bother with this one.
Kyle's Korner 