Review: Mayer’s ‘Sob Rock’
‘Sob Rock’ is filled with solid tunes and ample realisations
A pop heartthrob with a comedian’s wit and an instrumentalist’s chops, Mayer says he took up this style because he found it comforting during the pandemic.
John Mayer’s savvy use of Instagram and TikTok has made him one of the very few over-40 guitar wizards to connect with kids from the generation (or two) behind his. Yet it’s easy to imagine that the most meaningful engagement he’s had on social media lately came with somebody in his mid-60s.
“Killer new track John,” Steve Lukather of Toto wrote in a comment on Mayer’s June 9 Instagram post about his latest studio album, Sob Rock, and its lead single, Last Train Home.
Lukather, an architect of the highly chillaxed soft-rock sound developed in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, went on to praise Mayer’s “tasty playing” and to say that Last Train Home had the makings of “a smash” — the ultimate proof of concept for Mayer’s homage to the era of soulful white dudes, pastel color schemes and Bret Easton Ellis bestsellers.
A pop heartthrob with a comedian’s wit and an instrumentalist’s chops, Mayer, 43, says he took up this style because he found it comforting during the pandemic to be reminded of music he heard in his youth. You also get the sense, given his preCovid stint touring with members of the Grateful Dead, that he was eager to flex different muscles — and to hook into an already-blooming ‘80s revival that counts Tame Impala and Thundercat among its practitioners.
From its pictureperfect album cover on down, though, Sob Rock
— Mayer’s eighth studio LP and his follow-up to 2017’s ‘The Search for Everything’ — is so crisply rendered that it achieves an almost art-project-like quality that transcends those emotional and commercial circumstances. In an interview with the Blackbird Spyplane newsletter, the singer spoke with characteristic precision about his vision, saying his goal was to “make a new record from archival cloth” — to “find a way not to reproduce something,” he added, “but continue to produce it from the original loom.”
Inspired, he’s said, by Quentin Tarantino’s casting various OGs in his movies, Mayer recruited ‘80s studio standouts like keyboardist Greg Phillinganes and percussionist Lenny Castro to complement his usual players; their work provides just the right sparkle and groove to conjure the moment when bluesbased rock was giving way to something shinier and more synthetic — a sonic manifestation of the affluent optimism of the day. (Don Was co-produced the album with Mayer.)
Even the record’s marketing material, including old-school billboards peppered around LA, nail the exact fonts his predecessors would’ve used. “Make every drive a road trip,” one of the billboards reads — which, again, [chef’s kiss].
Of course, Mayer’s expert world-building — the latest act of curation by this discerning collector of high-end wristwatches — wouldn’t be nearly as fun to take part in if he didn’t fill the place with solid tunes, and Sob Rock
has plenty of those. A restless romancer once known for his willingness to kiss and tell, Mayer here addresses his reputation as a crummy partner: “Some people ‘round here been calling me crazy/ Some people say I’ll never love someone,” he sings in Til the Right One Comes,
which shimmers like an outtake from Tango in the Night.
But he also presents himself as a sensitive man who’s been mishandled by women; more than one song depicts him in a heroic light for having used those experiences to learn to change his ways.
SONGWRITING PROWESS
As with Henley, what brings you around to Mayer’s side is his songwriting — the luscious melodies in Why You No Love Me and the Dire Straits-ish Wild Blue and the vivid images
in Carry Me Away and New Light.
Then there’s Shouldn’t Matter But It Does ,a strummy, slow-mo ballad about another broken relationship in which he ponders what might’ve been: “It could have been always/ It could have been me/ We could have been busy naming baby number three.”
Mayer’s sore-throat voice sounds so cooled out in that one that you can almost picture him lying down as he sings. But with a wink of his eye — or, wait, is that a tear? — the tender and knowing Sob Rock is his testament to how hard it is getting easy right.