Critics rip Mayer as underachiever
Say musical output not matching talent, guitar chops
Yeah, but he's an amazing guitar player. That's what people say whenever John Mayer is held accountable for his pillow-soft songcraft, the dull sentimentality of his lyrics, or that cuckoo-racist interview he gave to Playboy back in 2010. Knowing how to caress a Fender Stratocaster should not absolve a man of such party fouls, so I make this admission through clenched teeth: John Mayer is an amazing guitar player.
It's hard to hear it on his records, where his over-compressed solos might zip past your ears, regardless of how sensitively they've been articulated. Strangely, you can hear it in stunning detail inside a cavernous arena, like Washington's Verizon Center, where on Thursday evening Mayer repeatedly sent his most intimate gestures fluttering up toward the 400 level's cheapest seats. He knows how to play the guitar, but more importantly, he knows how to play an arena.
And he filled this one up despite the fact that his seventh studio album, "The Search for Everything," hasn't been released in its entirety. Instead, Mayer has chosen to roll out the 12-track album in truncated four- song "waves," with the final wave scheduled to crash on April 14.
He's also chosen a sweeping title for a songbook that, so far, chronicles his breakup with pop superstar Katy Perry over a series of sleek R&B toe-tappings.
Meantime, Mayer has kept busy on the interview circuit, still doing damage control seven years after casually dropping the n-word in an interview with Playboy during which he also referred to his libido as a "white supremacist" and compared his anatomy to David Duke. Since then, we've been left to wonder how, among other things, John Mayer's freaky brain makes such un-freaky music.
That doesn't mean it isn't mesmerizing from time to time. On Thursday, Mayer played two paralyzing solos — one during the louche strut of "Vultures," another during a choppy acoustic rendition of "3x5." Both felt dizzyingly fast, breathtakingly delicate and entirely of Mayer's own invention. But just as he artfully undersold his virtuosity on the guitar, he often oversold the wistfulness in his voice, deploying his trademark sigh — the one that always makes him sound as if he's using his dying breath to practice a new pickup line.
It sounded as icky as ever, but if you stretched your ears, you might have heard a more fundamental human desire, a man committed to propagating the species at any cost. And while it feels odd to ponder whether there might be a cosmic sexuality secretly coursing through Mayer's music when there's already so much cornball sexiness slathered on the surface, it's important to remember that Mayer belongs to a proud lineage of schmaltz-shovelers — James Taylor, Sting — and that these softrock shovelers are often trying to bury something.
The most sexy- strange lyric to bubble up Thursday night came during "Love on the Weekend," a new song cut from a bolt of Fleetwood Mac-grade organza in which Mayer describes his love buzz as a "serotonin overflow."