If I pick someone local, no doubt several dozen of my songwriter friends will throttle me next time they see me.
It really depends on my mood, since I tend to bounce back and forth between mostly jazz, prog, metal, and straightforward rock quite a bit when listening to music, however if FORCED to pick a SINGLE songwriter (and not a collaboration or band), I’d have to say Peter Gabriel is one that rarely, if ever, lets me down. His music is complex enough to listen to multiple times and always pick out something new, diverse in that few of his albums sound the same, wide-ranging in its influences, constantly changing with each new release, and generally groundbreaking in that I frequently hear new instrumentation and musical ideas that I’ve not heard elsewhere.
