I Don't Trust Myself (With Loving You)
Here's why, if you're a songwriter, you should just write what you think no matter what. Against the wave of your own criticism. In I Don't Trust Myself With Loving You, there's a lyric in there that I think is a cop out. And no one has ever pointed it out. And that's what I want songwriters to understand. No one is as hard on oneself as the writer. In the bridge, I sing, "who do you love? Me or the thought of me?" That's been said before a billion times. And somehow or another, I have gotten away with having it in this tune. And no one said, that's a little cliche. I think it's a little cliche. But the point is, once it goes in a song, and people start digging that song, it proves that all the little thoughts you had about why you might not want to write it, are worthless. So you might as well write it. It's I Don't Trust Myself With Loving You, on Life with John Mayer.
"Forgiveness" by Paramore
I am an artist and I have a channel that plays music. I get to learn things about myself as I listen to other songs and I get to tell you about the things I've learned about myself when I do. I'm a massive Paramore fan. I'm one of many. Their album After Laughter is just a classic in what I like to call The Mayer Household. Even though it's just me and my jackets. This is a song called "Forgiveness," which when I first heard I thought has the same groove in a beautiful way as "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." But the lesson that I learn is that I am very hard on myself when it comes to how much time has passed since an album I've put out. So if someone says, "I love Born and Raised," before I think to say thank you, which I do say, my first thought is, "God, that's so long ago it doesn't even count." But for me to listen to Forgiveness by Paramore, which came out in 2017, my love for it is the same. I'm not thinking about how old the tune is. So what I've learned is I should probably stop obsessing about how old one of my tunes are because the love for an old song never ages. Mm-hmm. Look what I've just learned. It is Forgiveness by Paramore, it's on Life with John Mayer.
Badge and Gun
Alright, a bit of a warning for you, this one gets deep. I wrote a song called Badge And Gun. If you were to make a list of the songs that are the most liked, thought about and talked about, Badge and Gun would be very close to the bottom, if not the bottom. But Badge and Gun was my dear friend Bob Saget's favorite song of mine. And so effectively, it just became his song, because no one else ever talked about it. And so Badge and Gun almost was like, "you can have that one, Bob." That one, no one else has ever claimed that song. And how special it would become when sadly Bob passed away several years ago. And I took another look at the song and realized maybe Bob is the lead character in this song. Maybe he's the one who got called to somewhere else behind those hills. And sad as it is, he lives on in this song because he just loved it. And so now I think about him every time I hear it and every time I play it. It's Badge and Gun. We miss you Bob Saget. We love you.
"Slow Burn" by Kacey Musgraves
It's time to get a little technical on you. Get a little muso with you. Musicians have favorite chord progressions. I have one right now. It's the "one" to the "minor five." And every song becomes kind of the harbinger of that great chord progression people love when it trends and starts to inspire other music around it. To me, the song that fired people's love up of this chord progression, the one to the minor five, is Slow Burn by Kacey Musgraves. You'll know what I mean when you hear it. It's that chord that changes and it feels like your heart goes off a cliff and then drops down a little bit and is held in the arms of the artist who is singing it. It's Slow Burn, just like this conversation up to the song was, you know. I've done better and faster.
"Vienna" by Billy Joel
If you're around long enough as a musician, as Billy Joel very much has, your catalog changes as time goes on, especially in terms of what is the most popular to a generation. You could look at the charts and you could say that "Piano Man" is one of his biggest songs. But if you ask anybody under the age of 30 what their favorite Billy Joel song is, it tends to be Vienna. Something about the spirit of that song has leapt out of its time and become very, very relatable today. So that's why I'm going to play the song for you now. I too love Vienna. If you just played me all of this music and I didn't know any of it, I'd say, Vienna must have gone to number one. It didn't, but that's what happens when you're a legendary artist like Billy Joel and all of your songs have something to say. Let's go again to Vienna by way of our tour guide, Billy Joel.