The Forbidden Genre

From my perspective, country music has a bad reputation. It seems to be the one genre that nobody will listen to. To be honest, I was one of those people. However, this week I decided to give it a chance despite my bias against it.

The Beatles?

One of the reasons I got the idea to include country into my music diet this week is because of a more modern rendition of a Beatles song.

One of my favorite Beatles songs is Don’t Let Me Down. In 2013 John Mayer and Keith Urban performed their version of Don’t Let Me Down, and after discovering the performance it quickly became one of my favorite live performances of all time. It is one of the few live videos I go back and watch about once a month. When I first found the video, I was confused as to why a country artist was playing with John Mayer. To my surprise Keith’s playing blew me out of the water. He is obviously such a talented artist with a diverse skillset, so this week I decided to start with him.

Keith Urban

When listening to Keith Urban I actively sought out songs where he shows off on the guitar. Blue Ain’t Your Color is one I found where he plays a couple cool blues licks, but nothing really beyond that. I struggled to find anything close to what I saw in his performance with John Mayer. The song Brown Eyes Baby has some really tasteful playing as well, but it really just seems like he’s holding back now that I know what he is capable of.

Zac Brown Band

I asked my mom for recommendations before starting this week’s exploration because I know she is a fan of country. She told me to listen to an album called The Foundation by Zac Brown Band. Despite not really being a fan of country, this album admittedly has no bad songs.

This album offers everything. There are a couple songs with high energy and fantastic guitar solos, and also at least one song that made me cry. Different Kind of Fine has an amazing guitar solo that I immediately wanted to learn. However it took me almost 45 minutes just to get the first couple seconds using my ear. Another song called Sic em on a Chicken seemed super weird at first, but ended up having a super cool rock solo that came out of nowhere. My favorite song off of the album is Highway 20 Ride.

John Denver

John Denver is someone I kind of knew of before but hadn’t listen to a lot. His music reminds me of my grandpa because of his love for old country. This should honestly be its own genre due to its vastly different sound from the modern “pop country”. John Denver of course has the classic song Take Me Home Country Roads, but I found some other songs of his that I really enjoy such as Back Home Again, and This Old Guitar. I would definitely recommend him to anyone who hasn’t heard him before.