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Originally Posted by robm321 /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I think this says it best. Except Andre Bocelli has a beautiful voice. I don't think John Meyer has any special talent on the guitar.
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Then you haven't heard or studied his stuff very thoroughly. That's fine -- you're not required to. But as a guitar player myself, and one who has listened to, played and tried to play many of his songs -- I can assure you that he is an exceptional talent. If you play guitar, give a try to playing one of his early "pop" hits -- Neon. Unless you're a truly exceptional player yourself, it'll take you a week or two just to get the fingering down at half or quarter-tempo. It'll take another few weeks until you can play it cleanly at normal tempo. Then try to do the same while singing the entire song through.
(It's funny, though, that you mention Prince -- as I was arguing with people about his guitar playing talent 20 years ago, in much the same vein. People refused to accept that such a commercially-successful pop artist was actually capable of playing guitar as well as I claimed he could. This entire discussion is so reminiscent of the Prince arguments years ago it's spooky.)
Back to Mayer. There aren't many singers/songwriters out there right now who have the same combination of songwriting talent and guitar playing ability. Two clips posted on YouTube don't suffice for a thorough evaluation of somebody's talent. You come to understand the depth of somebody's talent at any given task
not by listening to them for 3 minutes but by listening to a variety of their work over a longer period of time. It was obvious in a short clip that Jimi Hendrix was a phenomenal guitar player, but the depth of his genius couldn't be appreciated until one listened to the length and breadth of his work. The same is true of Mayer. (I'm not equating them, BTW. I'm simply making a point about exposure vs. evaluation of talent.)
You know, I wasn't going to comment on this, but now I guess I will. Somebody who plays classical music is a classical player. Somebody who plays jazz is a jazz player. Somebody who plays rock is a rocker. Why isn't somebody who plays blues a blues man? Mayer's blues may be more influenced by rock or jazz or pop than many others, but that doesn't mean it isn't blues. Listen to "Come Back to Bed," "Covered In Rain" or "Gravity" and tell me he doesn't play the blues. Better yet, listen to "Out of My Mind," and tell me why it would be out of place in, say, the Robert Johnson or BB King catalogs. If you didn't recognize his voice in that song you'd never know it wasn't something written and played decades ago by an acknowledged blues master. The cut off of TRY! is played with honesty and feeling and everything people keep trying to say he doesn't exhibit.