Hello welcome to my series of quick takes designed to get you ready for Eurovision 2019. Just some quick thoughts / my take on each of the 41 songs this year. The countries are in alphabetical order so without further ado: Lithuania.

Country: Lithuania
Singer: Jurij Veklenko
Song: Run with the Lions
Personal Score: 23 out of 41
My Prediction: NQ

I’m going to be the first in line to tell you that this is cookie cutter song. This is a mix and match of songs that are on the radio from the past five years and in a way that doesn’t really work. It doesn’t end up with a “personality” because there’s not anything to latch onto. It has a lot of repetitive lyrics, it’s got the weird cha-cha-cha shaking sounds, it’s got falsetto, it’s got overlapping female vocals, it’s got a pre-chorus that gets quiet before the chorus does…the same thing but now with slightly more backbeat. Oof. This is just a generic song and Jurji is far better than this song deserves.

I wouldn’t say that Jurji is really do anything to help the song specifically as he doesn’t really connect with me either but his vocal performance is one of the better ones and he basically crushes this song vocally in a way that some of the other performances doing these very cookie cutter songs seem to fail at. It’s pretty easy to fall into the Eurovision trap of having a radio-play song that isn’t sung well and sometimes those get high marks but Lithuania has an uphill battle with this song. I doubt it’ll make it out of the semi alive without amazing staging and a retooling of the song (neither of which is going to be coming any time soon). Kind of a waste of a good performer honestly.