The Importance of Listening

How often do we judge something before we have actually had a chance to experience it fully? This is something I was forced to recognize I had done yesterday.

I downloaded (yeah, yeah, I know, but there's no way I'm gonna find it over here) John Mayer's latest offering The Village Sessions EP. Now, I don't usually pretend to be a music critic, but I have to sound off on this one. It is 6 songs, all of them acoustic versions of songs from his last album, Coninuum, and the John Mayer Trio album, Try! which is, perhaps, not a good start. The first song is also the first track on Continuum, and is called "Waiting on the World to Change". It was a huge hit, won a Grammy I think, etc. This version features Ben Harper also. When it started, I thought, "Hey, they kept the same glock thingy from the album version", and then thought, "Hey, he just played the electric guitar part on an acoustic instead", followed by, "Hey, they kept the same organ part, too", and lastly, "Hey, isn't his vocal the same, too?", which of course it is. So basically they just changed one guitar part (which already may have existed from the original tracking of the song), and re-mixed it. And Ben Harper? He sings backup on the choruses. That's it. What a waste.

So while I was thinking these things, I kept hearing the song, but I stopped listening, which is, sadly, not the same. In fact, when that song had ended, I continued to not listen to the rest of the album, decided it was crap, and promptly deleted it. A day later, I realized on the way to Gwangju that I had put the songs on my mp3 player to listen to later, and then forgot they were there. I played them again, this time skipping the useless remix of "Waiting on the World to Change". I found that a few of the songs are really good versions, if a little bare. But that's the point of an "acoustic" version nowadays, I suppose. Anyway, the point is that I stopped listening, and consequently almost missed out on a nice couple songs that I already knew, but not in this way. I hope I don't make the same mistake again.