The first I'd heard of him was on all of Sonos' marketing images. His album was used on the controller for a long time as the default image. Coincidentally, the default image on their current marketing materials now belongs to an album by G. Love, a friend of Jack Johnson and artist on Johnson's own label.

I started listening to him only because of the airplay some of his songs from the Curious George soundtrack got in Portugal (while I was on vacation). I recognized the name and had some additional listening time when I got back.

In addition to a few nice interface tweaks in iTunes 8, Apple also messed up a few things for no apparent reason.

The good:
-The list view can now show/hide the album art which used to require 2 different views
-You can now set the Sort tags when multi-editing metadata (the UI used to only appear when editing a single track)
-New grid view

The Lame:
-Some items in prefs have been moved around for no reason
-When multi-editing tracks, the compilation tag is now on an OPTIONS tab, a different place than when editing a single track
-A number of other tags on the options tab should probably be on the primary info tab to make for faster editing
-New grid view has no sorting options (it has options for what to show, just not how)
-New grid has no options to change the displayed cover size
-There's a "video" tab when editing metadata for files that are not video files
-No new metadata supported (I'm really after TLAN ID3 for Language and proper multi-genre support)
-Genius requires an iTunes account