I do like the kick drum and bass guitar on this record. The kick has a solid, tight attack at the low end that’s complemented by just the right amount of lower-midrange ‘knock’ in the 300-800Hz region, which means that it cuts through the balance beautifully on any system without recourse to any of the more aggressive ‘clicky’ frequencies above that. The bass delivers a lovely consistent warmth to the texture, by virtue of a fundamental frequency that’s pretty evenly balanced with its second harmonic. This is something that many project-studio productions I encounter struggle with, either on account of an inappropriately chosen instrument/pickup or because the amplifier (whether real or simulated) begins rolling off the low end below 60Hz. And of course, this dependable low-end weight effectively enhances the kick-drum too, given that the bass guitar plays pretty much in lock-step with it throughout. Admittedly, the lack of appreciable energy from the bass guitar above about 200Hz does effectively render the instrument inaudible on some smaller playback devices, but I’d be more inclined to worry about that if the part had more in the way of melodic interest. As it is, the small-speaker listening experience still has a solid foundation to its rhythmic groove (from the kick) and a clear harmonic framework (from the clear and sonorous guitars), so the musical content actually suffers very little under such circumstances.

Another noteworthy element of the drumkit sound is that the cymbals are incredibly low in the balance – the two start-of-section cymbal hits in the second chorus (at 1:40 and 1:55) are just on the boundary of audibility, for instance. This makes a lot of sense, of course, because it keeps the upper spectrum clear for lots of nice vocal detail and also for the high frequencies of the acoustic and slide guitars, which are such important genre flags here. Within this context, however, the snare drum feels like it must surely be a sample, as it seems inconceivable to me that the rich stereo complexity of its tone could have been achieved without the overhead microphones in particular being far louder in the balance. The very different and much quieter snare sound you can hear briefly during the fill at 1:38 clinches it for me. (Assuming, of course, that the backing track isn’t just AI-generated, which wouldn’t honestly surprise me enormously in this case, given the extremely generic mainstream country textures on display…)

Whether sampled/generated or not, though, the choice of a brush-hit snare sound works really well. What most people seem to overlook is that brush hits often provide a good dose of low-end weight which lets them feel solid even in quite busy arrangements. Furthermore, their soft attack ‘burst’ is much more resistant to masking and heavy limiting than the shorter-lived transient of regular stick-hit drums, yet their subjectively more restrained character helps to maintain one of the inherent psychological illusions required of most mainstream songs, namely that the lead singer should appear on roughly equal footing with a drumkit, despite the typical disparity in acoustic power between those two sound sources in the real world. And, while we’re on the subject of the snare, don’t miss the tambourine that sneaks in behind it to gently lift the choruses – a well-worn arrangement trick, admittedly, but very tastefully implemented here nevertheless.

Beyond the sonics, though, the song structure’s worth a closer look too. The first thing to point out is that about 60% of this song is chorus, which is a pretty impressive feat when compared with recent hits like Ella Langley’s 'Choosin' Texas', Siena Spiro’s 'Die On This Hill' and Taylor Swift’s 'The Fate Of Ophelia', which clock in at roughly 35%, 45%, and 50% respectively. So how does Lefty do that? Well, it helps that she starts off with a stripped-back half-length chorus right at the outset. She also returns to a similarly less groove-driven feel for another half-length chorus right at the end of the song, and because this texture is already well differentiated from the full-band sonority of the second chorus (1:40-2:10), the intervening eight-bar chorus coda at 2:10-2:26 provides enough of a musical palate-cleanser between them. In addition, both ‘main’ choruses are effectively double choruses, with lyrical changes providing an important element of variation, especially during Chorus 2, where the arrangement changes hardly at all. All that said, I suppose it should come as no surprise that the song focuses so hard on its chorus, given that this section (in incomplete form) went viral on TikTok before the release version existed – or indeed that the chorus is (gasp!) almost exactly 15 seconds in length…

While it appears that some reviewers have been quite hard on the songwriting here, there was one feature I particularly liked: the prechorus that’s used to substitute for the second half of the second verse, which is gently surprising on two different levels. Firstly, it deviates from the four-chord harmonic pattern that most listeners will have assumed was going to be a fixture for the whole song (given that it’s already been the foundation of two choruses and a verse); and, secondly, it’s only four bars long, whereas every other song section is eight bars long.