"Mortality is on Bob Seger's mind on I Knew You When, an album dedicated to his departed friend Glenn Frey [Eagles] ... Eagle isn't the only dead rock star to haunt the album. Seger covers Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen, both selections - "Busload of Faith" and "Democracy" - nodding to the American mess of 2017, another element that adds a sense of immediacy to the record. Despite these undercurrents of sentiment and politics, I Knew You When can't quite be called a meditative, melancholy record, not with roughly half the record devoted to fist-pumping arena-fillers that feel piped in from several different eras".