Somehow we’ve never covered dude solo…

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[5.00]

Will Adams: Solo piano and voice! Cue the hundreds of bootleg house remixes with YouTube descriptions containing some variant of “Original is good but kinda boring, thought I’d rework it for the dancefloor haha.”
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Somebody read that tidbit about “Someone Like You” being the first solo piano-voice ballad ever to top the charts, eh? Legend delivers his marks — nod to classic spelled-out R&B, then nod to the Beatles — and his romantic message, but this is made for playlists that’d slot him alongside Christina Perri.
[5]

Megan Harrington: Pianos, supermodels, matrimony; this should be “November Rain,” right? Too bad it’s lacking that epic, unstable blend of narcotics and narcissism. Skids right past the shirtless Slash solo and stops at tasteful and sophisticated crooning. 
[5]

Brad Shoup: It’s one of those ballads that lays things out too literally, too starkly, for me to ever implement it in the real world. Legend’s ivorywork keeps tugging this thing into existential ponderousness, even as he’s dishing out nonsense like “magical mystery ride” and double-tracking himself into a watery grave. Basically, this is a bit stranger than it once seemed.
[6]

Anthony Easton: The phrase “my head’s underwater but I am breathing fine” is perfect: sentimental, on the edge of being a sodden mess, but so lush and well-constructed. John Legend’s seductive power continues to be one of my favorite ways to drown. 
[9]

Iain Mew: “All of me loves all of you/Love your curves and all your edges/All your perfect imperfections/Give your all to me, I’ll give my all to you….” THERE. Right there. That’s where something, anything, about what “all of me” is would have fitted perfectly, and at least made the narrative a bit less predictable than the plodding music.
[3]

Jer Fairall: Saying that you love someone all the way down to their “perfect imperfections” is possibly the sweetest compliment that you could ever pay to another person, but any first-year creative writing prof would have rightfully drawn a red line through “perfect” — for being oxymoronic and redundant, sure, but for missing its own point. Loving someone doesn’t mean finding a way to render their flaws flawless, or even simply adorable, but understanding that a person’s imperfections are part of what makes them a whole person. Perfection is for deities, not humans.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Keep your soppy verses to yourself, sincere piano guy.
[2]