A Definitive Ranking of EVERY Song from Miranda Cosgrove's About You Now EP

  Welcome Back to Disney (& More)!👋😊🎉I hope you enjoyed my last, way more Disney Channel-related post, on A Definitive Ranking of EVERY Hannah Montana Song (in honor of the 20th Hannah-versary), and that you’re ready for some more NOSTALGIC FUN down music memory lane.🎶💿🥳 ‘Cause today, and for the next two days, I’m taking a bit of a trip back to my Nickelodeon-watching days to talk all about the VERY ICONIC and UNDERRATED discography from one of the biggest stars of that channel, Miranda Cosgrove.👩🏻📺🎤🎶💿 🤍🩵🩷💚❤️💛🖤

Like I’ve mentioned before on this blog, Disney Channel and Nickelodeon were THE channels to watch when I was a kid growing up. As I'm sure it was for every person who was born in the 90s and early 2000s. Disney Channel, of course, being the superior one of the two.🏆😊📺But I definitely had a few favorite shows that I liked to watch on Nickelodeon quite a lot when I was a kid. iCarly, of course, being one of them. I also watched Drake & Josh a lot, too. Especially, mostly before iCarly was even a thing. So, I became quite a BIG FAN of Miranda Cosgrove from watching those two shows.📺And I became an even bigger fan when she started to release her own music.🎶💿In fact, I bought her last two albums on CD when they first came out in the early 2010s. CDs that I still have and definitely utilized for this little series of posts I've created.😊💿🎶I will say, though, after watching Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV documentary in 2024, I became disgusted with ALL of Nickelodeon and ALL of the people involved in that whole thing.😞😠👎👎📺🚫So I no longer watch the Nickelodeon shows that I grew up on and, well, basically any and all shows created by Nickelodeon. In other words, I don’t watch any of the Nickelodeon shows with the abusers, supporters, and enablers involved in those horrific situations that were in-front-of or behind-the-scenes of said shows, that are mentioned in that documentary. So, this is the only kind-of-Nickelodeon-related post you’ll ever see from me on here. Thankfully, Miranda Cosgrove was innocent in that whole situation. ‘Cause I just couldn’t not talk about her ICONIC music from that era on this blog, because it was a big part of my early teenhood that definitely impacted me in all the best ways, and it still does. So, let’s get into it! Starting off with her DEBUT EP, About You Now!🤍🩵💿🎶

Like I briefly mentioned before, About You Now is the debut, pop-rock, punk-rock, electropop extended play (EP) by American actress and singer Miranda Cosgrove. It was recorded in 2008 and released on February 3, 2009 to the iTunes Store by Columbia and Epic Records, in partnership with Nickelodeon Records. The EP was used to promote Miranda Cosgrove’s song of the same name, which was released in the fall of 2008, and to my surprise is actually a cover of the Sugababes hit single. And I don’t know who the Sugababes are, but okay.👍🏻😊I’ve only ever known Miranda Cosgrove’s version of that song. But the song ("About You Now") was in fact co-written by Cathy Dennis and produced by Dr. Luke (Again, I don’t know who those people are, but they must be good.), and it was originally recorded by the Sugababes and released as a single on their fifth studio album Change.💿🎶👍🏻😊

“About You Now” became Miranda Cosgrove’s second song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at #47.👏👏Her highest peak to date, apparently. The EP not only featured remixes of previous songs by Miranda Cosgrove, but it also featured two new tracks that had never been heard before at the time, “Party Girl” and “FYI”. Miranda Cosgrove promoted the song “About You Now” and the accompanying EP mainly through live performances and interviews. One of her most notable being her performance at the 2008 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Where she sang the song while on a float. As all the singers who attend that event usually do every year at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But that was actually Miranda Cosgrove's FIRST EVER LIVE performance of "About You Now". And I do remember watching that performance live in 2008 on Thanksgiving Day….SO VERY NOSTALGIC.📺🦃🍽🍂🧡🤎💗

Miranda Cosgrove also embarked on a radio promotional tour, and made appearances at radio concerts, during the summer of 2010. On September 6, 2010, she performed “About You Now” along with two other songs from her second album, Sparks Fly, on the Today Show. She (Miranda Cosgrove) also headlined her own tour, the Dancing Crazy Tour, named after the single from her second EP that was also co-written by Avril Lavigne and Max Martin and produced by Shellback (Now, I have definitely heard two of those names before. But I am just learning now that they helped create “Dancing Crazy”!?!😮👏👏). That tour began January 22, 2011 and ended August 10, 2011. And a couple of songs from this About You Now EP were a part of the setlist for that tour. It featured dates in the House of Blues locations such as ones located in Houston, Texas and Anaheim, California. Miranda Cosgrove also performed at several theatres on the Dancing Crazy Tour, including locations in cities such as Atlanta, Georgia, Tampa, Florida and Orlando, Florida. The Dancing Crazy Tour was financially successful.👏👏In fact, the second show on the tour, which took place in Minneapolis, sold about 54% of its tickets. And apparently, according to sources, the show’s total gross revenue was $37,256.👏👏 The fourth show of the tour, which took place in Rosemont, Illinois was much more successful, selling 90% of the available tickets. The total gross revenue for that show was $118,435.👏👏"About You Now" is also one of the tracks included on the Japanese edition of Miranda Cosgrove's second album Sparks Fly.

Interestingly enough, Miranda Cosgrove’s musical career first actually began with her recording the theme song, “Leave It All to Me”, for the hit tv series in which she starred on as the titular character, iCarly. Which, WOW, what a song to start with. Still a BANGER.👏🏻👏🏻🎶📺Following the success of iCarly, on June 10, 2008, Columbia Records released a soundtrack album of the show. An album that I decided not to include for this little series of posts since it has to do with that Nickelodeon show that I no longer support, and it wasn’t really a Miranda Cosgrove solo album, which is what this little series of posts is all about.👍😊But that soundtrack album did include four songs recorded by Miranda Cosgrove: “Leave It All to Me”, “Stay My Baby”, “About You Now” and “Headphones On”. Miranda Cosgrove apparently once stated about that soundtrack album, “Before that, I didn’t see myself making an album, but when I spent time in the studio doing the theme song and saw how much fun it was, I wanted to go back." And thank goodness she did, otherwise we would have never gotten Sparks Fly or High Maintenance.😊💿🎶🫶

Miranda Cosgrove officially announced plans for a debut album in July 2008, stating that the album was "different" from her contributions to the iCarly soundtrack, with her "co-writing and getting really into it", and saying that "[I'm] playing a character on iCarly, but this shows more of myself.”👏👏Then, as mentioned earlier, on February 3, 2009, Miranda Cosgrove released her debut solo recording exclusively onto the ITunes Store; the 5-song EP About You Now. Which, as also briefly mentioned before, the EP included the title track “About You Now”, a remix of that same song, a remix of “Stay My Baby”, “FYI”, and “Party Girl”. 

When it comes to the reception of this EP by critics, it apparently wasn’t very positive.👎👎As Commonsensemedia stated at the time that, "While Cosgrove's acting career has advanced considerably, her singing sounds similar to her passable vocal performance in School of Rock. Problem is, that was six years ago, when Cosgrove was nine years old. As a result, the synth-pop pattern that pervades so much of today's tween music doesn't come across as well for Cosgrove as it does for other bubblegum popsters with slightly stronger voices, like Miley Cyrus and Jordan McCoy. No doubt her TV popularity will still draw fans to this EP, but the release won't go down as one of the better ones in tween-music history."👎To which, I totally DISAGREE with those statements. First of all, who is Jordan McCoy? And second of all, although I will admit that I don't love every song on this whole EP (for reasons I’ll go into more detail about later), there are a couple of songs on this EP that are SO ICONIC and definitely some of the BEST songs EVER in music history, in my opinion.😊The Daily Vault also stated in their review of this EP (About You Now), “As it turns out, Cosgrove is tackling non-tween material, trying to convince her adult listeners she's not as young as you might think. She wants to go back in time to a previous point in her relationship with the subject in the disc's title track since she "knows how I feel about you now." She sings about how girls "dig rejection" and how she'd rather "rock, that's how I roll" in "FYI." Finally, in the third original track on this EP, she spouts on and on about how "you can take the rock out of the roll but you can't take the party out of the girl" in "Party Girl." Finally, in "Stay My Baby," she speculates about being in a long distance relationship when "she's back at school," which I infer as being college? So, Cosgrove is tackling adult problems while singing to a tween audience." To which, again, I DISAGREE with most of those statements. I mean, yeah, (SPOILER ALERT) I don’t love the songs “FYI” and “Party Girl”, either. And kind of for those same reasons, but those songs shouldn’t be taken that seriously because we have to remember Miranda was a tween when she did this EP. And all kids/tweens try to be more grown-up. So, I wouldn’t fully hate on this EP for those few bad songs, lyrics or meanings. It's kind of just something to giggle about now. But we all know the fans always appreciate the art and the artist more than the critics. So, you know, those negative reviews don’t really matter. They didn’t matter then or now. But for some reason I just thought that I would include them here, for a bit of history's sake, I guess.🤔😊🫶

Now, when it comes to my history with this EP, for some reason this is the only Miranda Cosgrove album/EP that I had no idea existed until just a couple of years ago when I was looking up Miranda Cosgrove’s discography to create a post about. I, of course, had known the two ICONIC songs “About You Now” and “Stay My Baby” since they were first released back in 2008. ‘Cause I remember watching Nickelodeon back then as a kid and the music videos for those songs were always playing during commercial breaks.📺💿🎶 And then of course, as I mentioned earlier, I also have a fond, special memory of watching her (Miranda Cosgrove) perform “About You Now” live at the 2008 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV.📺🦃🍽🍂🧡🤎💗But those are the only songs that I knew very well from this EP before listening to the whole thing. I had actually listened to this whole EP last year for the FIRST TIME EVER. The original “Stay My Baby” that I knew for the longest time, isn’t even on this EP, though. I never even knew there was another version of that song until I listened to this EP for the first time last year. I had also never heard the “About You Now” remix until last year, or the other two non-remix songs on this EP, “FYI” and “Party Girl”. So, listening to this EP last year was definitely kind of like hearing new music for the first time, for me. Even though this is definitely not a new EP. And the reason I keep saying I listened to this EP last year is because I originally intended to get this little series of posts up way sooner than now, but that just didn’t happen. But it’s always better late than never, right?👍😊

Anyways, so yeah, I don’t have many memories when it comes to this EP as a whole. Just more-so memories of those two specific songs I mentioned. ‘Cause I didn’t own the CD of this EP, either, like I did with Miranda Cosgrove’s other albums/EPs. So, this is definitely the least nostalgic Miranda Cosgrove album/EP to me, but that doesn’t take away from how FUN and SO LATE-2000s, GIRLY POP-ROCK this EP is when you listen to it. Like I said before, I don't LOVE every song on this EP, but just the few songs that I do like makes this EP still SO ICONIC because just those few songs are GREAT. That’s why I just had to make a post about it. So, what are we waiting for? Let’s finally get into A Definitive Ranking of EVERY Song from Miranda Cosgrove’s About You Now EP!🥳🤍🩵💿🎶

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(from LEAST to MOST FAVORITE)...

#5 "FYI"

The beat of this song is fine, it’s more-so the lyrics that are problematic. I mean, her singing, “You’re a maniac, but it’s my decision / When I say I’m so, so serious.” And in the second verse she sings about how this guy’s a lunatic that’s on a mission to corrupt her soul, and she says it’s all his because she’s been wanting it, Mr. Recollision.”. ‘Cause she’d rather rock, that’s how she rolls?!? Such a toxic relationship. Not a good message to listeners. Especially to the young girls who were actually listening to this song at the time. Like, seriously, though who wrote these lyrics? ‘Cause even Miranda shouldn’t have been singing them. And then everything in the chorus is not great or true, either. As she basically sings about how girls like boys who are not committed to them, and as soon as they walk away we (girls) follow them (the boys). But she says that that’s okay because who wants to have some guy sticking by your side, because us girls can’t take rejection. So another not-so-great message, and those lyrics definitely put all girls in the same box. And don’t even get me started on the bridge. So, that’s why this song goes last for me. Again, the beat is fine, but the lyrics just are not. Although, I will admit the chorus is catchy. I’ve been catching myself singing it because I can’t help it, but it’s one of those songs where I don’t like that I’m singing it. I will also say, though, as a tween, I definitely would have loved this song when I was younger if I had heard it. ‘Cause I wouldn’t have really known what she was actually singing. 

#4 "Party Girl" 

I only ranked this song above the one I just mentioned, because lyrically it’s better. In other words, the lyrics in this song aren’t as problematic as the ones in “FYI”. Although, who’s picking her up to take her far away from home? The beat of this song isn’t great, which is why it ranks lower than the songs I’ll be mentioning next. As it’s a bit annoying, gets a bit monotonous and all over the place. But for the audience that this song and EP was originally meant for, it works. 

#3 "About You Now (Spider Remix) "

This song is better than ones I ranked below it just because any version of “About You Now” is better than those two other songs. However, I don’t love remixes. So, that’s why this song doesn’t rank higher. I just prefer the original, non-remixed version. But again, I would still rather listen to the remixed version of this song over the others below, because the lyrics are still better and more meaningful. 

#2 "Stay My Baby (Spider Remix)"

Again, I just don’t understand the point of remixes. I mean, I guess it’s just to make a song more danceable and suitable for a party if it’s not already a party-type song like this one (“Stay My Baby”), one that’s more slow. But remixes just always take what’s good and special about a song and ruins it, in my opinion. The remix of this song being no different. Remixed songs just are not necessary. Especially for this EP to have two remixes of already PERFECT songs. So, as you can tell, I definitely prefer the original, non-remixed version of this song and I’m wondering why they didn’t include that version on this EP instead of this remixed version? I only ranked this song above the “About You Now Remix” because since my #1, as you probably already guessed by now, is the original version of that same song I had to rank the only version of “Stay My Baby” that was included on this EP here at #2 because that song is such a close, CLOSE second to “About You Now”. So, any version of “Stay My Baby” will do, I guess. Especially in this case. 

#1 "About You Now"

I mean, I didn’t even have to re-listen to all of these songs in order to know that this was going to be my #1 FAVORITE song from this EP. ‘Cause it’s always been ICONIC and truly never gets old. I’m just glad that this original version was actually included on this EP, but that’s really no surprise, because this song is the title of this EP for a reason. This song is just SO NOSTALGIC and it’s great lyrically and beat-wise. It’s not only the BEST song on this EP, but definitely one of Miranda Cosgrove’s BEST songs she ever released. Every time I hear this song I instantly think of the ICONIC music video (Which, her outfits in that video by the way, are also SO COOL AND ICONIC in and of themselves.) and her performance of this song on the 2008 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The two things that I’ve associated this song to since I was a kid and first heard this song. And just hearing the very beginning beat of this song instantly gets me hype,and takes me right back to that era. It’s makes me feel all the emotions in the BEST way. This song is just EVERYTHING. SO WONDERFUL. 

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Well, that concludes A Definitive Ranking of EVERY Song from Miranda Cosgrove’s About You Now EP!🎉🎶💿🤍🩵I really enjoyed getting to go back and listen to this EP once more after discovering it and listening to it for the VERY FIRST TIME last year. ‘Cause again, even though I don’t LOVE every song on this EP and that didn't change after listening to it last year, this EP was still VERY NOSTALGIC and FUN to re-listen to. And I will say, it’s definitely a must-listen for anyone who is a fan of Miranda Cosgrove, and anyone who’s just a fan of late-2000s, girly pop-rock music in general. This EP was a pretty GREAT start for what was to come from Miranda Cosgrove musically. So, props to her for that.👏👏 Although, none of the EPs she put out could out-do what her next album did. An album that I really can’t wait to talk about, and is really kind of the sole reason why I wanted to create this little series of posts this week in the first place.🤍🩷💚💿🎶So, until tomorrow, make sure that you hit that follow button to get notified when that next post goes up, comment down below what your favorite song is from About You Now, and come Back to Disney soon for more GREAT, FUN, NOSTALGIC music from Miranda Cosgrove! 👋🏻🤍🩵🎉🎶💿✌🏻