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When he was first in America, John got the chance to appear on television with Ray Charles, performing a duet on ‘Heaven Help Us All’. “Ray Charles was an artist I’d spent hours fantasizing about being when I was a kid, hiding in my bedroom with my record collection, miming away to his albums, Charles was “gracious and kind and encouraging”. writes John. (Chilton, 2019)

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Recalling the importance that The Band played in his music John said, “Their songs felt like someone switching a torch on and showing us a new path to follow, a way we could do what we wanted to do. this was what we craved to write. (Chilton, 2019)

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Billy Stewart is one of his biggest influences. What proved to be a significant factor in Elton’s life was Stewart’s body confidence. “He had turned his weight problems into a kind of gimmick,” writes John” (Chilton, 2019). In the 80s and 90s, Elton went through troubling times in his personal life, but he never stopped delighting fans with bright outfits and new hits. (L'OFFICIEL Россия, 2021)

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Ravi Shankar met George Harrison of The Beatles in the mid-’60s when Harrison contacted him about taking sitar lessons.  Fascinated by the instrument and the spiritual elements that ran through Indian music, Harrison had ideas as to how he could incorporate the sitar into the Beatles’ music.  The Beatles’ “Love You To,” was one of the first pop songs to include a sitar. (Kimber, 2020)

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During their formative years, some of the Beatles' biggest hits were covers of Berry's songs. Throughout the band's iconic career Berry's influence was on nearly every album, from "I Saw Her Standing There" off Please Please Me to "Back in the U.S.S.R." off the White Album. "His stories were more like poems than lyrics," wrote Paul McCartney. (Miller, 2017).

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The Beatles and Bob Dylan shared a one-way relationship, one which saw Them admire Dylan’s talent for lyrics and craftmanship. After that first meeting with Dylan, their next record, Rubber Soul, saw The Beatles dip their toes into the water of folk-rock. The idea of putting one’s soul into a song was something they could only ascertain from the traditional values of Dylan’s work. (Taysom, 2021)

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There are two things strikingly similar between the two artists. The first is their singing styles, which Mayer himself has admitted to shaping his vocal tone after Vaughan’s. The other is their overdriven guitar tone, the similarities of which can be heard in Mayer’s “Out Of My Mind". (Ze, 2019)

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like Hendrix, Mayer loves to mix chords and scales and use double stops, and this can be heard in songs like “City Love,” “Vultures,” and “Slow Dancing In A Burning Room”. Mayer also always uses his thumb to fret notes on the sixth string, leaving his other fingers free to play ornamentations around chord shapes. which is synonymous with Hendrix's style of playing. (Ze, 2019)

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John Mayer recalls his first encounter with blues legend B.B. King performing live. “I literally cried,” Mayer said. (Hanrahan, 2006) one of Mayer’s songs that has a strong B.B. King touch is “Gravity,” where the intro line combines smooth bends with bend vibratos, and the line is also essentially in a modified B.B. King Blues Box. (Ze, 2019)

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Elton John has been one of my biggest inspirations. His writing broke my misconception that as poetry, all songs must rhyme and helped me view songwriting as purely a form of storytelling. An example of this would be “Your Song”.  “The original lyric was written very rapidly on the kitchen table of Elton’s mother’s apartment on a particularly grubby piece of exercise paper” (Williams, 2021)

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The Beatles were very experimental with their sound and their ability to create, innovate, and think outside the box influenced me to be a more adventurous producer. The Beatles inadvertently developed many recording techniques that are widely utilized today. For instance, George Harrison's guitar solo on the track "I'm Only Sleeping" was double-tracked twice—once with fuzz and once without—and then reversed to produce "a dreamlike mood."  (Vargo, 2014)

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I have always been influenced by John Mayer's skill on the guitar, notably The use of fretting notes with the thumb and playing riffs over chords, where Mayer plays the chord on the first beat and then continues to play a riff with the notes in the scale (Ze, 2019) to better outline the melody.