Songs About Jane
By: Maroon 5
This is objectively Maroon 5’s best album.
After this album they progressively became more and more mainstream and poppy and fom a musical perspective it became less interesting. Songs About Jane is an essential album from their discography, and, in one mans opinion, their best work. For this reason I chose to cover this album.
When I’m looking for albums to cover I have to like the album not just a handful of songs and Songs About Jane is a great overall album. As opposed to (for example) ‘Hotel California’ where I’ve only ever heard of the title track and couldn’t for the life of me name another song off that album. For ‘This Love, She Will Be Loved, and Sunday Morning’ to all be on the same album is a big green flag for a red album.
With that said lets get started with ‘She Will Be Loved’
Tutorials to all songs will be at the bottom of this page
She Will Be Loved
Story time:
I remember at one point just messing around on the guitar and figuring out the verse part of this song. It’s only two chords and not hard at all but I did it by ear and at the time I was like 🫨
Then one time I was in the middle of a conversation and heard a C minor (the first chord of the song) played on a piano and I stopped the conversation to turn around and ask if that’s what it was. Indeed it was a C minor and because I had learned this song I was able to pick that chord out by ear. This was early on when I had only been playing for maybe a couple years.
This Love
This is just a fun song to play. I really enjoyed learning this one cause unlike ‘Sunday Morning’ for example, it changes up more with distinct song parts musically not just lyrically. This was one I always liked but never got around to. Now I’m sure I’ll be pulling this out at any gigs I play :)
The Sun
This is definitely a lesser known song off the album. When I’m choosing what songs to cover it’s a mix of the music and the lyrics. Originally I really wanted to do “Harder to Breath” and “Shiver” from this album cause musically they’re great and the chorus goes hard but it’s just not the heart that I have lyricaly.
Must Get Out
Another unknown song off the album is “Must Get Out”. The feel of this song is much brighter compared to the rest of the album. Music can be thought of (like many things) as tension and release. Within the context of this album, the tension in all the songs before this one is a much darker musical tension before it gets released, but in this one it’s much brighter. This makes it sonicly stand out from the rest of the album.
Sunday Morning
This might be one of if not actually the first song that I covered on my instagram account . This is one of those songs that I’m fond of because, when I’m just sitting and don’t know what to play, the 2-5-1 progression of this song is a pretty standard go to and I just end up playing Sunday Morning.
Final Thoughts
I’m not a drummer so I didn’t talk about it but the drums in this album are so essential to the sound and musical intrigue, it would be wrong to not at least acknowledge them.
Drumming is something I haven’t gotten into cause unlike guitar drums are bigger, louder, and more expensive, but I do dabble because of looping. You can watch me do this live on twitch but songs for example like “Valerie” are songs I wanted to loop and play but had to spend some time specifically listening to the drums to figure them out on midi. This forced me to understand some basics and appreciate it a little more. Drums for me is like one of those things you know of but not enough to understand or appreciate how hard something is to play or how much it adds to the music. This album has a lot of well mixed elements but it wouldn’t be the same without the drums.
I’ve shared all this to let you in on the bts process a little. It’s something I think is cool and like to imagine for other people’s work so there’s some insight. Almost a diary of sorts.
OK that’s all for now folks. Thanks for reading.