Turns out that he slots with some of my all-time favorite smooth rockers from the 1970s and ’80s with extreme comfort. I found that I could get beyond his pretty-boy smirkiness and the cultural baggage of songs like “Your Body Is A Wonderland” and “Daughters” and appreciate him as a songwriter and guitar player. With Mayer, I found that putting him in the same mental context as artists such as Phil Collins, Dire Straits, and Bruce Hornsby - all of whom were once wrongly maligned as cheesy relics, and are now rightly acknowledged as consummate pop-rock craftsmen - transformed how I thought about his music. If you know anything about music history, it’s clear that artists who are loaded down with inconvenient contemporary baggage - and John Mayer definitely had a deluxe luggage set of inconvenient baggage - suddenly appear liberated once they escape their era. Bob Weir asked John Mayer to join his band. People I admired seemed to admire John Mayer. (Consider that Mayer, in that infamous 2010 Playboy profile doomed to re-appear in nearly everything subsequently written about him, brazenly used the n-word, an offense that certainly would’ve permanently derailed his career had it occurred even five years later.)īut I had reason to suspect that I had judged him unfairly. As an interview subject, he seemed smug or even arrogant. Musically, I dismissed him as a lightweight, a precursor to every bland pop-folk superstar of the past two decades, from Ed Sheeran to Shawn Mendes. If Mayer had that career arc, would I feel differently about his music?Īt the time of this experiment, I was indifferent to Mayer as an artist, and had negative feelings about him as a person. This was actually pretty easy to imagine, given that a musician of his ilk - a soft-rock guitarist with pronounced singer-songwriter musical leanings - was much more common in the yacht-rock era than today. That’s because Swift is forcing all of us to look at the structure of power and how women can learn from the mistakes of the past.īefore you go, click here to see celebrity exes who never buried the hatchet.Several years ago, I decided to conduct a thought experiment with John Mayer: I imagined him having the exact same career, except now it started in the year 1980 rather than the year 2000.
And yes, there will be much discussion about their prior relationship, just like we’ve debated about Gyllenhaal. Well, Mayer might want to brace for the second round of consequences because we know Swift is busy burning it all down and taking control of her recordings. “It’s like he’s faced with the humiliation all over again,” adds the source. And that’s exactly what Swift called out in her “Dear John” lyrics: “Dear John, I see it all now that you’re gone/Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with?/The girl in the dress, cried the whole way home, I should’ve known.” So it’s no wonder Mayer would “prefer he was left out altogether” because he knows the wrath of The Swifties is likely upon him. Yeah, that’s quite an age difference, especially for someone in their late teens.
If you’re wondering what happened between Swift and Mayer, you have to go back 12 years to 2009 when they began dating - she was 19 and he was 32. Jake isn't too happy about the Taylor Swift publicity. “He’s not going to make any public comments directly related to her songs or album.” “John is trying his best to avoid the attention he’s been getting from Taylor’s new album,” they said. An Us Weekly source revealed that he’s currently taking a low-key approach to the Swift spotlight. We already know that Mayer called her tactics of writing about former lovers “kind of cheap songwriting” to Rolling Stone in the past, so he probably won’t appreciate this coming back to bite him a second time around.
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