Music is a double edged sword. On one side the creator spills what they have to say out onto a canvas of sound using a medium of rhythm, tone, and tempo and their message can often be so abstract that it’s easily obscured by the listener. But on the other side, sometimes creators indulge in such a straight forward piece that it is meant to be perceived as nothing more than how it presents itself at face value. The beauty is that both are equally as perfect, correct, and complete. That is, when it comes to music. There is no correct. As an example, today we have Jack Johnson. Instead of talking about his newest album we are going to be talking about his earlier work, (I’ll get into why later). Jack Johnson’s quick and almost reggae like vocalism mixed with his almost strictly acoustic sound breeds a new kind of surf music that he has had a large part in engineering this style. His second studio album in 2003, On and On, is my favorite example of this. Throughout this album I’m eager to critique Johnson for being repetitive due to the fact that every single track off this sixteen track album besides two, features Johnson’s acoustic guitar sound, but I really can’t make that criticism. Throughout this album, and the majority of Johnson’s discography he manages to keep a primarily acoustic driven sound without really getting stale or repetitive. This is due to the vast majority of other instrumentation Johnson experiments with to catch listeners attention and create the chill, melodic, tone that comes off of the majority of tracks on this album. I found the shorter song length in this record to actually be very pleasant and to work well and cohesively. With only a handful of songs being over three minutes it creates an almost cute or sentimental theme with his acoustic sound that works quite well. The shorter song length adds to the quickness of the messages that Johnson wishes to convey on most of these tracks. My favorite track off the album “Tomorrow Morning”, has a great example of what prevents Johnson’s music from getting stale. He uses a very similar rift to a few others that he uses on this album however, the jump from the intro into the verse and pre-chorus are so damn catchy and the tempo build is executed so damn well that each song that features elements like this just doesn’t get old. I truly think that’s what is beautiful about Jack Johnson. On some of his newer projects he has divulged into more of an alternative sound with longer tracks but I truly think Johnson doesn’t need to do that to keep his music engaging. I think he has struck such a gold mine with this style of music that he almost self-engineered that expansion of style almost isn’t needed. I respect all of his newer work and some of it is actually quite good, but when I think of Jack Johnson I think of childhood tunes and soft, cute, acoustic guitar, and Curious George, and lyrics about love and finding yourself, but with his newer music that kind of gets lost in his search for unneeded originality and personally, I don’t think I’m willing to lose that.