Sometimes the context of a performance makes all the difference.
Hitting a homerun in professional baseball is cool, but hitting a leadoff homerun in the first game after one of your teammates died and sobbing as you round the bases? Chills. Whitney Huston’s performance of the Star Spangled Banner at Super Bowl 25 was great, but it coming shortly after the start of the Gulf War made it epic. And Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt is amazing, but when you take into account that the music video was the last thing he filmed and recorded shortly before his death, and that is was filmed in the derelict and abandoned “House of Cash” museum, it becomes arguably the greatest music video of all-time.
Sometimes performances are great. Sometimes the context surrounding the performance makes it great.
In the case of Maren Morris in Zedd’s “The Middle”, it’s a little of both.
I became a fan of Maren Morris through her work in country music, like “My Church“. But songs like that don’t really show off vocal ability like “The Middle” does. I’m not saying country singers aren’t talented, but if I had to pick one weakness to the genre, it would be that the vocal performances are (typically) not that exciting. They’re basic, and they’re carried by the tone of the songs and the fun lyrics. Country songs are made for the common folk to sing with a guitar around a campfire, not for your audition to Julliard’s vocal performance program.
So I liked Maren. I liked her songs. But then I learned that she was the person singing lead in “The Middle”, and I actually paid attention to the performance, like “Oh, this is Maren Morris? Let me see what she’s all about,” and I was astounded.
The vocals are impressive, and the fact that they are coming from “just” a country singer makes them even more impressive (Note: I was going to go with “fire” instead of “impressive” here, but then I realized that I was a lame, out of touch, aging adult with no real concept of whether people still said that or not, so I sank into a deep depression about the inexorable rush of time and changed it).
The song is pretty catchy, and has an interesting sound design, but what really makes the song jump off the radio at you is the performance Maren Morris turns in. And that’s all I can really write about it. Which is admittedly pretty lame for a song review, but what I’m getting at is that you have to hear it for yourself. I can only explain the power of the voice and the epic runs she effortlessly throws in there so far.
At a certain point, it just becomes easier to tell you to listen to the song.
And I mean REALLY listen. Because there’s so much going on in this song that it’s easy to just sort of tune out the brilliance of the vocals and let the song blandly wash over you. But if you really listen, you get to hear the real mastery of Maren Morris. And it becomes VERY apparent that she is not one of those pop musicians who’s famous because their parents are producers or were rich enough to buy a record label. She’s all talent.
It’s a fine song. And it’s a good vocal performance. But when you also consider that this performance is coming from someone who could have stayed safely in their own little genre, who was already successful and had nothing to prove, but that she proved it anyway, it becomes awesome.
