Five Songs You Should Hear – John Mayer and Bonnie Raitt

I ended up having a fairly long Facebook chat with a few students today on a variety of songs, and five songs came up that I recommended they have a listen to… and they just hadn’t heard them before! So I figured I’d share the five right here for your listening pleasure!

#1 – Bonnie Raitt – I Can’t Make You Love Me

Some of you will have seen me blog about it before, but it’s excellent and WELL worth checking out.

#2 – Bonnie Raitt – Thing Called Love

This one is awesome. She’s a great slide guitar player. And Bruce Hornsby is a mean accordion player.

#3 – John Mayer & Keith Urban – Sweet Thing

I’m a big fan of John Mayer, not necessarily the most technical (or even safe singer, given his ongoing vocal health issues), but MAN he can sell a song like very few others.

#4 – John Mayer & Keith Urban – Til Summer Comes Around

I did this song a LOT with a client a year or two ago, and it really suited their voice. A really moody anthemic song, great melodic hooks throughout.

#5 – John Mayer – Free Fallin’

Save the best til last… just an awesome tune done so well by Mr Mayer.

John Mayer – In Your Atmosphere

Came across this video of one of my favourite artists the other day. I’ve blogged about him before = the wonderfully talented John Mayer. If you’ve never heard him before, check him out.

Interesting point, his own bad habits with his voice were a major contributing factor to him ending up having major vocal surgery and being unable to sing for the last 18 months or so. Definitely worth working on your voice to avoid this!

John Mayer – Something Like Olivia (Acoustic in the Studio)

The highlight of last night’s youtube bender.

I was introduced to John Mayer almost a decade ago when he hadn’t quite made it onto everyone’s radar, and one or two of his songs grabbed me, but not all of them. Since then he’s reinvented himself a number of times, to escalating success each time. I’ll be doing a blog post on him in the future, but for now, just enjoy this acoustic version of ‘Something Like Olivia’.