I think 'And I Love Her' is one of those songs that prove that sometimes less is more. The playing is flawless but I consider that Metheny's approach to the song is smarter, though my favorite still is Feliciano's.
Yeah, every songwriter goes through this journey. When they're inexperienced beginners, they think good songwriting is about using the strangest and most unique sounding melody and harmony etc. But eventually they learn that the real skill, the number one hardest thing to do when songwriting, is write something using very simple chords and melody. Less is more, as you say. The beatles were the masters of this. They wrote songs using very simple harmony and melody, but the songs were still beautiful. The songs felt so natural that it was like the song had always existed. You can't imagine a world where the song And I Love Her didn't exist, for example. But it was written in the 60s by Paul McCartney. Every experienced songwriter knows this. The hardest thing to do is write a great song with very simple chords and melody. It takes a lifetime to truly master it. But yeah, less is more. And once you're an experienced songwriter, you also now know when you actually _CAN_ use unusual chords and melody. It has to be used sparingly, tastefully. Not for every single bar. Just a couple of bars per chorus or per verse. That's enough to put it over the top and make it a great song. Some songwriters are just great at this from the beginning. They never had to learn to be good songwriters, they just had a natural talent for it. John and Paul were examples of these, they were never bad at songwriting, they were just great at it from the start. George was the opposite, he had to spend years learning to write songs and perfect his craft. And he did, and he became just as good as John and Paul if not better. He put in all that work, had his early phase of making everything as unusual as possible, which you hear on albums like Revolver and Sgt Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour. But eventually he stumbled onto the fundamental truth of songwriting, that using very simple harmony and melody and still making an all time great song out of it, that'd the hardest thing to do in songwriting, but it's worth it, because once you learn it, you become world class at songwriting. Learning this lesson, is how you become one of the best song writers in the world. That's what George did. And eventually he wrote songs like Something, such a simple simple song, and perhaps the greatest song of all time. It's such a stark difference compared to all his songs that featured sitars and were emulating Indian classical music. He eventually dropped all that and learned how to write "normal" songs, and was the joint best songwriter in history, joint with Paul and John and Roy Wood from ELO, Wizzard, etc. If you listen to Roy Wood's work, you'll be absolutely stunned at how he's not way more famous and recognised as an all time great. People just love I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day and don't ever listen to anything else he ever wrote. But anyway yeah
