12.7.15 Q104 Holiday Show Cleveland, OH

"......The rise of Sheeran—an affable but unlikely star who plays acoustic-guitar-based songs, hardly the kind of stuff a young pop audience traditionally goes for—seems to have opened the door for other like-minded aspirants to make the transatlantic crossing: Ireland’s Hozier, who had a major left-field hit last year with the song “Take Me to Church” and recently played his first Coachella to a sizable crowd, and England’s James Bay and George Ezra—the latter of whom, like Sam Smith before him, managed to land a coveted spot on Saturday Night Live months before wider American audiences were even aware of his music. The thing they share is that they’ve all been presented from the get-go as thoughtful, self-determined artists, not pop flashes in the pan."

I would not mind at all if Adam went into an even more organic direction. It's very believable and commanding when he does that. May be the overwhelmingly positive responses from covering a subdued but very heartfelt country song are a way to tell him something I love "The Original High" because it's more restrained but I think that he could go even further into that direction.