Passenger is one of the most beginner-friendly artists in the modern folk catalog, with one important caveat: you’ll need a capo, and you’ll need it placed higher than feels natural the first time you try. Mike Rosenberg’s vocal register sits high enough that he records most of his songs in keys that aren’t great for open-position guitar. Tab writers solve this by putting the capo at fret 5 or 7 and reducing the song to standard four-chord loops.
Let Her Go is on this site already and is the right place to start. Capo on the seventh fret, then C, G, Am, and F shapes underneath. The same configuration works for Scare Away the Dark and Heart’s on Fire, which means once you have Let Her Go in your hands, you’ve got the framework for several more songs at no additional cost.
The intermediate stretch is Holes, which moves the capo down to the fourth fret and adds a fingerpicked intro that’s worth weeks of practice. The pattern alternates bass note and treble notes in a Travis-style figure, and it’s the kind of right-hand technique that transfers directly to other folk music. Once you have Holes clean, you’ll find that fingerpicked passages elsewhere in the catalog feel manageable too.
What’s worth borrowing from Passenger’s playing is the willingness to put the capo high. New players often resist anything past the third fret because the strings start to sit close to the frets and the chords sound thinner. The trade-off is that the song sits in a key that suits your voice, which matters more than the slightly compressed tone. Once you accept that capo at fret 7 is fine, you’ll start finding it makes a lot of unfamiliar songs suddenly playable.