The Bachelor: Listen To Your Heart: Season 1, episode 1 performance grades
The theme of this week’s episode of The Bachelor: Listen To Your Heart was angsty pretty boy, alternatively known as John Mayer. Let’s see how our crooning contestants fared in their debut performances.
Well, The Bachelor: Listen To Your Heart is essentially forcing me to sit through the thing I hate most, musicals. As such, it’s time to tap into our inner 7th grade theater kid and actually try to take this portion of the show seriously.
Well, as seriously as Ryan’s crush on John Mayer, anyway.
It appears that a prerequisite for the show’s premiere was learning at least one John Mayer song, as that was the focal point of this week’s episode. The other requirement being “Nashville is my passion.”
With that, let’s see how the contestants who attempted this feat fared out.
Ryan Neal–“Gravity”
Vocal Performance: A-
Ryan is actually a decent singer, color me shocked. Although I’d venture to say, despite his man crush, John Mayer isn’t really a good muse in terms of range. To be fair, “Gravity” isn’t really a song that demands a large range, more so the ability to sound ~smooth~, which Ryan sufficiently pulled off.
That said, a quick surveyance of his Instagram paints him as a more bluesy, soul singer, which this song did not particularly showcase. I would’ve much preferred another rendition of “A Song For You”:
Interpretive Routine: A
Ryan’s hips were swaying as much as his eyebrows. He had a solid airplane sans-arms motion going with the rhythm while singing, and killed the whole eyes-closed-face-contorted singing face that I suppose is meant to be “sexy.” Seeing as I would likely look like I was spastically shaking a tambourine sans-tambourine, he pulled this portion off swimmingly.
~Romance~ Level: A
“It’s really sexy watching Ryan sing”–Jamie.
Ryan killed it on all aspects of this part of the Listen to Your Heart date – he was extremely attentive to Jamie’s voiced discomfort and lack of experience in the genre, following her lead and changing the key accordingly.
He made her feel comfortable at the end of the day, and that should probably be what this show is about. He also snuck in a few glances during the recording and the smiles were certainly reciprocated. I can’t sing, nor do I desire to, but if either of those points were true, I’d pick Ryan as my John Mayer for sure.