John Mayer, nearing 40, seeking a comeback
LOS ANGELES — John Mayer can explain where he’s been.
In fact, once he gets going, he probably won’t stop, given the amount of time he has spent in private processing his recent selfimposed irrelevance — the “lean years,” as he calls them.
A generational guitar talent and reliable soft-rock hitmaker with seven Grammys, Mayer is also a master conversationalist prone to verbal solos, noodling in impressionistic bursts about his nature and career, weaving in therapy-speak, potential stand-up bits and a barrage of mixed metaphors as if he’s writing this story himself. That’s what got him into trouble in the first place.
“The elephant in the room is that we’re sort of talking about the double-headed dragon of the Rolling Stone interview and the Playboy
interview,” Mayer said about why he left pop music’s A-list and how ready he is, emotionally and musically, to return.
Across four hectic days this month, as Mayer, lucid and optimistic, finished his big-budget new album, “The Search for Everything,” and filmed a music video for what he hopes will be his next hit single, he seemed to especially relish reflecting on his 2010 undoing.
Recalling the consequences of those infamous magazine articles — in which he
used the phrase “sexual napalm,” referred to his male anatomy as David Duke and somehow separately used a racial epithet — Mayer was vivid and virtuosic in his self-laceration.
“What has to happen for a guy to believe that he’s totally welladjusted and be that far out of touch?” he said. “My GPS was shattered, just shattered.”
At 32 and obsessed with outsmarting the idea of a “cliched rock star,” he explained, “I started to invent my
own grenade.” (His big mouth.) He was “a Mack Truck without brakes.”
Now approaching 40, “I’m old enough to look back on my life and go: ‘ That’s probably the photonegative shot in ‘ Behind the Music,’” Mayer said. “Coming up after the break — boom — the downfall.”
In reality, after those turbulent moments he moved to Montana, grew out his hair and made two more majorlabel albums — “Born and Raised” and “Paradise Valley” — that were less “Your Body Is a Wonderland” and more Laurel Canyon. “It’s rivers and cows,” he said. “There’s no
sexuality there.” The relatively modest sales reflected that.
But the exile couldn’t last, not for this restless people- pleaser with the baby face and a penchant for dating some of the most famous women in the world ( Jennifer Aniston, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry).
In late 2014, as he began writing what would become “The Search for Everything,” out April 14, Mayer realized: “I’m a young guy. I like girls. I want girls to like me. I want to make music and be thought of as attractive. I was finally ready to re- enter that world and grow back into it.”