Some frequent readers of this blog might consider it appropriate that I’m posting a John Mayer song on September 11 — one painful experience commemorating another, or something like that.
I know Mayer has many detractors, but he also has legions of fans, a surprising number of which are critics. He’s the rare lightning rod who seems better respected by serious music critics than serious music fans.
Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith straddles the line between ‘Folk Rock Derivative’ and ‘Pure Pop’ in my musical genome. He got his start as a folk singer before expanding his sound over a dozen or so albums to include pop and jazz influences.
He never has delved into country, though, so he won’t be the first artist on my list to make a clean sweep. And while he has made use of increasingly varied instrumentation, his weapon of choice is the acoustic guitar, not the piano.
This is an appropriate random selection for the middle of my musical genome project.
I like Pink. I like her songs, I like her voice, I like her attitude. And I really like the one album of hers I own, 2008’s Funhouse, from which this SOTD is pulled.
And yet, I have never considered buying Pink’s earlier albums, nor would I rush out to buy whatever she puts out next.
Volume 7 of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series is the companion soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s excellent Dylan documentary No Direction Home.
The album, like the film, traces Dylan’s development as an artist from his earliest days through his electric phase, culminating with the famous “Royal Albert Hall” concert where an angry fan yelled out “Judas!”
My next ‘Folk Rock Derivative’ artist is both a perfect example of the genre and an argument for scrapping the concept of musical categorization altogether.
Nobody can argue that Paul Simon isn’t a folk rock artist — the man practically invented the genre when paired with Art Garfunkel in the 60s. But he has since explored so many different styles — from gospel and jazz to a few continents worth of world music — that one could be a huge Paul Simon fan and have no affinity for folk rock whatsoever.
