The guitar jangle is genuinely pretty, but Morrissey's delivery feels so performatively world-weary that it tips into parody for me. The misery is announced, not felt.

That restraint in the verses makes the chorus actually land.

Ne-Yo understood something that a lot of R&B guys missed entirely: you can communicate more longing with a whisper than with a scream. The falsetto on tracks like 'Mad' isn't decoration, it's the actual emotional argument of the song, and that precision is what separates him from the era's belters who were just performing pain rather than actually conveying it.