Compared to John Mayer's Room for Squares, his debut, Inside Wants Out, originally self-released in 1999, sounds like an unplugged record. It contains three songs that Mayer later reworked for Squares — "No Such Thing," "My Stupid Mouth" and "Neon" — all done here at a gentler tempo, with no instrumentation beyond his acoustic guitar. Mayer's gift for melody was already in full effect on this record; without the flourishes of major-label production, he sounds less like Dave Matthews and more like a coffeehouse troubadour you'd stop drinking your latte to pay attention to.

“I'm Yours”

Jason Mraz re-emerged after his disappointing second album with this lead single, a Jack Johnson-esque ditty about giving yourself fully to someone else. The success of the reggae-tinged song (it earned two Grammy nods and a spot on the Billboard singles chart for well over a year) was something the folk-pop singer never predicted when he wrote it in 15 minutes at home. "I played a happy-hippie chord progression that would probably work without 50 different Bob Marley songs," he told Rolling Stone. "I thought, 'It's too novelty. This is a nursery rhyme,'" concluding that "you can never guess what's gonna be a hit."