I don’t say I don’t like it. I like it as much as I like any other reasonably skillful attempt to imitate Neil Young. Okay, fun in the sense of a tribute band. But why would you buy Sandler’s record when you could just play Neil Young’s? It doesn’t bring anything new to the work.
Compare this, for example, to Richie Havens’s recording of “Here Comes the Sun” or Tori Amos’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or Seu Jorge’s David Bowie covers or plenty of artists’ (the Byrds, Jimi Hendrix) Bob Dylan covers or Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me Not to Come” or any recording by Joe Cocker or the Ventures.
What I’m saying is that Sandler is displaying talents of mimicry and some technical proficiency with singing and playing the guitar. He’s not displaying much artistic talent, however.
Take a look at Neil Young himself. He’s got one of the worst singing voices in the world, but he’s applied his artistic instincts and authentic voice to produce beautiful works of art.
I am not commenting on his Funny, and in fact I am not a big fan, as I stated. However, based on my experience as a musician and sometime singer, I disagree with your statement about his singing being easy. It isn’t.
**Nobody **- in the video, Sandler is playing with Waddy Wachtel on lead guitar. Waddy is a long-time session player with his own interesting story. But he is a known vintage guitar guy and that black Les Paul with a Bigsby vibrato, if it is vintage, is a curiosity for geeky reasons. I suspect it is meant to be like Neil Young’s Old Black, a '54 Les Paul Custom with one pickup replaced with a Firebird mini-humbucker pickup - but Waddy’s git is different in some respects and looks pretty darn cool…that’s all.
Adam Sandler clearly has a good voice. Back in his SNL days, he did a bit called Opera Man on the news, and the few seconds of good singing before he threw in some off-key warble to make it “funny” showed a hint of promise. He does sing in The Wedding Singer.
I don’t think he’s got a great future as a professional musician necessarily, but he definitely sings and plays guitar better than most actors or comedians. But then again, so does Hugh Laurie, and probably others that I’m just not coming up with at the moment.