Get your guitar or ukulele (or even piano) in your hands and take a look at some of the easiest Jack Johnson songs to learn.
Jack Johnson was born and grew up in Hawaii, where he spent his youth surfing and playing guitar since he was 14, so that lead him to start a music career. He had launched his first album in 2001, the “Brushfire Fairytales,” which holds platinum certification for over 1 million sold copies. Until now he has released six more albums. Apart from these albums he has also written songs and soundtrack for several movies. Since he has studied film, he also had an appearance in several TV series and movies and had directed and written music for several documentary movies, some of them being The September Sessions and Thicker Than Water.
The music of Jack Johnson can be characterized as soft acoustic rock influenced by folk, reggae and surf music. Anyway, it is a chill down music perfect for the hot summertime. According to his own words, the greatest musical influence on his work is by the Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, Radiohead, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Tribe Called Quest, and Neil Young among others.
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Not only Jack Johnson is a popular musician. He is very active in raising awareness about ecological problems and especially ocean oriented ones. There are several non-profit foundations and social networks launched by him and his wife. The first foundation started by Jack was Kokua Hawaii Foundation in 2003. It is oriented towards schools and education of children about ecology and problems our planet is facing with pollution. The second foundation was raised in 2008 by Jack and his wife Kim, the Johnson Ohana Foundation for promoting and “supporting organizations that focus on environmental, art, and music education.” In the same year he launched a social network called All At Once, just to name some of his social web activities (which are not foundations), where people interested in environmental issues can easily connect and do some action in supporting plastic reduction in their communities, or growing organic food and promoting Farm to School movement.
Since he is mostly interested and involved in oceanic ecological problems, he is of course very much aware of the dangers of pollution and tons of garbage and plastic which end up in oceans about which he is very concerned. One of the best mediums to send a message to a large group of people is the music. That is why one of his latest videos from the last album “All The Light Above It Too,” for the song “You Can’t Control It” features him being covered in plastic. Song lyrics are also talking about the rising pollution in the oceans.
But let’s get back to music now since we’re here to see some of the easiest Jack Johnson songs to learn. For some warm-ups first, go to the 15 Easiest Acoustic Guitar Songs to Play for Beginners. There you will find songs which will introduce you to some easy guitar songs for beginners chords.
Surely level of your musical knowledge and time you want to spend learning something new will highly influence your opinion on what easy is. Anyway, we have tried to get your job for learning Jack Johnson’s song as easy as possible, so we have first searched for some opinions which songs are suitable for beginners. We have gotten some of the answers on Guitar World, National Guitar Academy, Live Ukulele and forums like Acoustic Guitar Forum, Yahoo Answers and Ultimate Guitar. Since many people were curious how to play Jack Johnson Upside Down on guitar, we have also checked if that is one of the easiest Jack Johnson songs to learn, but we will get on this further down on the list. For the song chords that we have included on our list, we have used E-Chords as the main source.
We hope we have covered some of your favorite Jack Johnson song here (and, yes, let’s say now that you will see here how to play Jack Johnson banana pancakes on guitar, as one of his most popular songs), but we have surely included some easy Jack Johnson songs guitar chords. We have here included both ukulele and guitar as an option for playing, and if you have a good ear, you can sing along as well, or whistle. So, let’s see the easiest Jack Johnson songs to learn further down on our list:
10. Better Together
Song chords: F, Dm, Bb, C, Gm
Better Together is the first song from the album In Between Dreams and was later released as a single record for gaining much popularity. It was also nominated for the World’s Best Song and World’s Best Video by World Music Awards in 2014, so it seems that the simpler, the better rule applies here as well.
