I set out to start trying First Cut is the Deepest this evening, took hours to get anywhere as I was trying to parse the opening verse / general verse structure, and getting thrown by discrepancies, probably due to me being new, and it being late =_= (it’s 10:30pm atm and I’m hitting the hay like an oldie).
In Justin’s video, what he plays with accompaniment, what he lays out later on, and then what he subsequently plays through, all differ slightly and I spent ages sussing it out. (The singing of different chords than what were being played had me stressing my ears were broken for a bit there, Justin!) Anyway, in case anyone chances upon this who’s also contemplating this beginner tune, I have written it below.
The accompanied playthrough adds two opening bars, whereas when he starts laying it out later he starts in on bar three, so I’ve laid out both (bold is where the singing starts):
With singer:
GDCD||GCDC||GDCD||GCDC||GDCD||GDCD||GC[?D]open chords
Verse order walkthrough:
GDCD||GCDC||GDCD||GDCD||GCD[D]open chord riff
The beginning phrase “I would have given you…” on the accompanied playthrough starts on the picked (arpeggiated?) C, which is the last beat of the second bar, and carries over to the opening G of the next bar (specifically the word given), whereas with his walkthrough he starts straight into the singing on the opening G. Easy to remedy.
For the last bar, his verse walkthrough finishes the final D as the open chord riff, playing with the e string by either playing the third fret for a G or lifting off the Gb for the open e. It easy enough to work on and you don’t need to perfectly imitate it for it to sound nice.
However, in the accompanied playthrough that final D is preceded by a mystery chord to me, it looks like xx23oo, although playing it, it sounded closer to xx23ox to my learning ears.
Once I had sorted this all out for myself, accounting for tiredness (I spent roughly 2 1/2 hrs doing all this plus some playthrough tonight), I spent a good while also jotting the chorus progression into word, spacing it out and going through it while I sorted out where parts of phrases fell so I could follow along with the right progression instead of reverting to my memory of the song and getting lost when I started trying to read.
I’m very tired, but it was fun! I’m going to share my messy word document when I figure out how, and tomorrow I may clip my recorded muddling around and upload it as a video for my future self to look back on, both to see how I started with this song and also just how I started trying to work out stuff now that I’m trying a song that isn’t on the app or one with four chords and nothing to memorise, really.
**
In other learning log relevant stuff, my C chord is going great, finally, probably helped along by several hours of this song specifically, a good deal of which I spent squinting at my screen and therefore not looking at the fretboard. (Although, when I look at the fretboard for chords I usually can only see the top of the neck, maybe the fifth string if I’m lucky, so I feel less bad about it although it is still a crutch.)
Played a few songs for practice anyway and am coming along great with speed for them now, seem to be improving a bit faster, which I guess is down to chord familiarity and my recent focus on air changes over speed for the one minute changes practice.
I think I might dream of playing chords in vivid detail, tonight. 
, but thank you…I will continue here to chase a few system notification after securing some plants outside in the scorching sun 
and then will listen with great anticipation …
(but yes, pay attention to who says that 
)
) is hitting the strings, so I now have a bit of a bruise there. I think it strikes when the pick turns a bit and the flat side is hitting the strings. To counter that, if I try to death grip the pick my wrist complains and I suspect the pick will go flying, lol. Still, practiced strumming at that speed (DDUDUD) on its own and with the chord changes for like 8 minutes.
