Andy Cohen: That dinner Friday night, I gotta tell you—it was your first time in a restaurant, eating, in a year, right?
John Mayer: Over a year, yeah. This is my first time in New York in over a year.
AC: Wow. And you're here why?
JM: I came because I have not seen my dad since over a year ago, and he got vaccinated. And so as soon as he got that, a week after the second dose, I was on a plane out to see him.
AC: And he is 94?
JM: He's 93. So, you know, there's no good year to lose to the pandemic, but when you're in your nineties, the years become more valuable. So the fact that I didn't see him for a whole year—and I gotta say, I am the luckiest human being, that my dad, who's in an assisted living home in New York City, during the pandemic, literally survived. It's not dramatic to say, he survived. And I know how many people can't say that. So the value in that, and the luck in that—and it is luck! It is not a meritocracy. People didn't survive because they were better than another person. So it is just pure lottery luck that my dad literally survived. And it was a very heavy thing to see him again and know that, at 93, we lost a year, but he's still here.
AC: You were telling me the other night, you started playing guitar at thirteen. And then I said, "and when did you have your first hit record?" And you said 23. So, how incredible that in ten years—that's crazy. But another thing you said is, your dad was saying something to you about music, and I don't think I realized how into music your dad was.
JM: My dad was a piano player. He would play at the Rotary Club, and he would play off the page, you know? He was a written music player, and I was an improv, spacey—I mean, I would put the Sunday circulars on the music stand on the piano, and I would sing what I was reading on the Sunday circulars. [Sings] Tide, two for a dollar twenty-nine! Cause I didn't know how to read music, so I would read Sunday circulars and sing them just to have something to sing, you know. So he didn't quite understand the music thing as I was practicing it, because he went, "well, if I put up a sheet of music in front of you, you couldn't read it. What is this all about?" And I still don't know if he quite gets how I've made it, if I can't read music.
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AC: I loved having dinner with you the other night. I left you a message on Saturday morning, I was like, I felt so overstimulated by it. I felt like we just had a lot of conversation, it was so nice. One thing this year has made us all do, I think, is take stock and appreciate things that we have. Our homes! The ability to go out to dinner with friends! It's really somethin' else.
JM: You know what I think? I'm experiencing a little bit of a return to normality. It's like one step out of a hundred steps to normality, just to have dinner on Friday night. I really think that we're going to have to sort of rebuild our stamina for going out. I find now, when I go out, an hour will do me. Because we've sort of bonded with being alone, and there's a little Stockholm syndrome, where you're like, I want to go back to my cage now. Do you know what I mean?
AC: I totally do. And the thing is, [my son] Ben has just made that really—I just want to be home with Ben and I want to put him to bed every night. And I do put him to bed every night. So then, he goes to bed at 8, so then, am I gonna go out to dinner at 8? I mean, that is typically when I would go out. 8 or 8:30. I don't know, but—
JM: We're gonna have to rebuild the conditioning, to go to dinner and go out after that. Because we're so used to feeding ourselves socially, or entertainment-wise. So we're on our own schedules now, and it's like, well, I gotta be in the living room in ten minutes to do this thing that I wanna do! So now, I feel like we're really gonna have to go half an hour at a time over a series of months.
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