Ex Post Facto
The Morgan Wallen Post-Expectations Reality Check. TLDR: eh.
Here is part two of the Morgan Wallen review extravaganza. It was a bit delayed, mostly because it took so darn long to listen to. Hope it was all worth it.
To be honest, I was quite unsure and uninterested in his album. It seems that I am in the distinct minority because unsurprisingly it's topping all of the charts. Though I'd prefer to, and generally do, cover what I personally have gravitated towards recently, it behooves me as a reviewer to try and understand what is just so magnetic about his music that so many find themselves deeply connected to it.
Now that I have listened to the record properly and dedicated a significant amount of hours to this endeavor, what are my thoughts? How does it compare to my pre expectations?
Some initial takeaways….
First takeaway:
This was a remarkably mid-tempo forward record. Even more so than his typical mid-tempo skewed approach. I think back to his previous records that did have more upbeat tracks—"Dangerous" had the fast-tempo title track,and "One Thing at a Time" had its moments of energy. But this record maintains a consciously consistent tempo and vibe from top to bottom.
Second takeaway:
Everything operates at a very surface level. This is normally a critique that reads as negative, but we'll address the nature of that later on in this review.
Third takeaway:
Morgan Wallen appears to be undergoing flanderization. For those unfamiliar with the term, this concept originates from the long-running character in The Simpsons, Ned Flanders, and was popularized by the TV Tropes website. The phenomenon describes how a fictional character, over time, sees their most distinctive aspects become, at first, the main point of focus and then, ultimately, the only point of focus. It feels as though Morgan Wallen (who is, I'm sure, a human person with a wide array of life experiences and emotions) has been whittled down to an essential two or three different aspects. The surface-level approach from the second takeaway directly enables this reduction.
These three takeaways strike me as inarguably accurate. No judgement, per se. These aren't necessarily negatives. For example, you might appreciate the straightforward approach to song structure. Intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus. Maybe a brief bridge or solo but usually not. To the point, straightforward etc…. Yes. But it is still a shallow approach.
My listening experience was conducted over several different sessions, at different times of the day, and in different environments. The results were consistent: especially when listening to the music while doing something else simultaneously, it very easily receded into background music. Occasionally, there would be a stab of something different that would pierce my consciousness, but by and large, this functioned as background playlist music. That feels entirely by design.
This leads us to a crucial understanding: the mid-tempo uniformity, the surface-level approach, and the lack of distinctive exploration allows the music to flow seamlessly in the background. With nearly two hours of runtime, it could easily serve as something you turn on for a long drive and simply let run. It doesn't challenge the listener. It doesn't distract the listener. For streaming consumption, this is actually advantageous.
The formulaic and shallow nature appears to be integral to this intentional goal. The writers heavily featured on the record (Ernest, Hardy, and countless others) have demonstrated elsewhere that they are perfectly capable of delving deeper into more analytical and craft worthy territory. That's simply not the intended result here.
This brings me to an uncomfortable realization: I have numerous negative critiques of this record, but I must acknowledge they appear rooted not in incompetence, but instead in intentionality. Perhaps that makes them worse. That's difficult to determine. But the intentionality behind creating a streaming-era playlist explains everything I find problematic. The lack of distinctiveness in instrumentation, the absence of diversity, the way occasional details feel stapled on purely for the sake of minor differentiation rather than artistic purpose—all of this derives from the fundamental truth that this record is engineered as a streaming-era playlist rather than a traditional album.
How did this align with my expectations? Those who read the previous piece will recognize that this largely matches what I predicted, though it leaned even more heavily into mid-tempo territory than anticipated. It's long. Wallen is overextended. Counterproductive choices were made to try and elevate and differentiate filler material. The album dragged, although this time the front end was the more dreary part. The back end had a few more individual moments. Nothing about my opinion on Wallen the artistic personareally changed all that much.
What I didn't quite foresee was how Wallen has shifted his vocal style toward something more akin to a crooner approach, moving away from the raspy country-affected vocals that initially brought him to prominence. That's the most substantive difference I noticed. It isn't drastic but it's there.
There's something fascinating about artists attempting to traverse different musical territories. When someone aims for both mainstream pop acclaim and country music credibility, their are different approaches. Some choose to release targeted genre tracks. Kane Brown excels at this. Others blend all their influences into one style. This is a slow shift that has occurred to Wallen. If you squint, more seems to have been blended here, whereas previous records featured more distinctly country tracks alongside more distinctly pop-oriented material. This represents the new, slightly evolved Wallen blend. I would theorize his voice has adjusted accordingly.
Ultimately, within such a mono-themed sonic landscape, the moments that genuinely stood out were those rare instances of distinctiveness. There were some tracks that took a creative swing and either connected or missed spectacularly. These exceptions proved the rule about the record's overwhelming uniformity. The Dealer, Jack and Jill, Love Somebody and a few others were notable stand outs in this regard.
This brings us to the broader implications. Morgan Wallen is a cash cow, and everyone knows it. An entire ecosystem is becoming wealthy off Morgan Wallen's success. Record labels are generating unprecedented revenue streams. Songwriters, producers, photographers, paparazzi, sketchy looking fellas hawking knock off merch outside his performances. When an artist finds himself in such a lucrative groove, the incentive to change anything diminishes significantly.
Consider Hollywood. A scrappy studio like A24 takes risks because they operate with smaller budgets and don't require mega-hits to stabilize their entire business model. They can survive on several smaller, critically acclaimed films per year. No one is getting rich, but a comfortable niche can be carved out. But with Morgan Wallen—like a major Hollywood studio—there's tremendous pressure to pursue the tried-and-true formula, to lock in that automatic substantial payday and make the big bucks. Whether that manifests as Hollywood's endless sequels or Morgan Wallen’s big streaming playlist-style records that repeatedly cover identical ground with minor variations, the underlying logic remains the same.
This leads to a more fundamental question about musical consumption and artistic purpose. Those of us who read music blogs probably consider ourselves to be more sophisticated consumers of the medium. We listen intentionally, with focus and critical engagement. But this perspective creates a blind spot: most people do not listen to music intentionally.
For the majority of listeners, music provides a highly unintentional experience. It's turning on a playlist, switching on the radio, or playing that same CD that's been sitting in the car for months. Given this reality, why has Wallen struck such a chord with listeners?
The answer reveals a fundamental fallacy in music criticism. We assume people listen to music to hear what the artist has to say about themselves—some quest for authentic self-expression. This expectation might trace back to folk rock's obsession with authenticity, which filtered into critical discourse across all genres. But our perception that meaningful records require artists to reveal profound truths about themselves may be fundamentally misguided.
What most listeners actually want is not an artist speaking about themselves, but rather an artist speaking to them. Not preaching, but communicating through the perspective of "I'm a person kinda like you. I have human desires just like you do. You can filter your life experiences through my songs." Whether that involves feeling seen that your prone to a little too much drinking (3/4s of the record), living vicariously through someone else's indulgence of toxic impulses (Kiss Her In Front Of You, Come Back As A Redneck), or sharing in pride in a shared rural identity (Skoal, Chevy and Browning, TN) , the connection operates differently than critics assume.
People aren't seeking profundity. Morgan Wallen isn't attempting to deliver profundity. And that's sufficient, because most people aren't looking for anything more complex. If you nail the basic requirements of catchy music and hit the nexus point of the cultural connection, that's enough.
I don't consider this an indictment of listeners themselves. Rather, it represents a fundamental mismatch between expectations—mine, as someone who approaches music as craft and art, versus those who view it as entertainment and comfort. The nature of human experience, at least according to Maslow's hierarchy, involves a progression toward achieving comfort and security. Even if one disagrees with his specific psychological framework, the underlying truth remains: for many people, Morgan Wallen provides the ultimate comfort listening experience and that's all they want out of their music.
It's unchallenging. It doesn't demand intellectual engagement or significant intentionality to feel connected to the music. It doesn't aspire to be challenging, and crucially, it doesn't maintain pretensions about being more than it is. Therefore, nothing feels absent or lacking.
In this context, the album succeeds completely at everything it sets out to accomplish. My critiques fundamentally target the very intentions that drive the project—which may be the most damning criticism of all. This represents an incredibly successful album that achieves its goals with remarkable precision. The question becomes whether those goals themselves merit the achievement.
The flanderization of Morgan Wallen as an artist, the streaming-era playlist mentality, and the calculated comfort-food approach all serve the same master: commercial optimization disguised as artistic expression. It's a strategy that works brilliantly for its intended purposes, even if I find it to be barely tolerable at its best moments. I do admire the hustle though. If you want the exact same vibe, but half the runtime then just go listen to Tucker Wetmore or something.
Thanks for reading,
Joe
It’s basically Country-Pop, definitely. But it’s great to listen to while doing home repairs.