Ronan Farrow, John Mayer
Introduction (00:00)
Narration [Ronan Farrow]: John Mayer is a seven-time Grammy winner a multi-platinum selling artist and a prodigious guitarist who's played with everyone from Eric Clapton to Ed Sheeran. But in recent years you might know him better for making headlines than for making music from tabloid ready falls in and out of love with famous women to a notorious tell-all Playboy interview then he disappeared from the spotlight avoiding social media at interviews and building a quieter life in Montana I caught up with him in LA as he works on a new deeply personal album and tries to put the focus back on his very first love.
Early Life (00:36)
John Mayer: When I discovered the guitar when I was 13 all of the creative energy went into that. So I was sitting in class writing lyrics. I was in math class on one of those uneven desks writing lyrics.
Ronan Farrow: One story that's out there is that Back to the Future was the genesis of the guitar idea.
JM: That was the big rocky moment for a lot of kids who were into music. And that for me was like the moment the nerd gets revenge right? Like who is this nerdy Marty McFly kid, and then he gets to play basically—
RF: Blowing people's minds.
JM: [Laughs] Yeah blowing people’s minds. Which is a child fantasy, being the quiet kid in the room while all of a sudden he plugs in and plays.
RF: Were you an outsider?
JM: That's a good question I had created this alter ego which was by day this sort of mild-mannered kid who nobody really saw, and then by night I would be in a room listening to Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and Freddie King and Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, and I was playing along with CDs. And then I went to school and it's very difficult [...]
RF: But then you ultimately got to do that—you pursued that as an adult?
JM: It happened really fast for me. Really really fast. By 2000 I signed my record deal, 2001 record came out.
RF: Room For Squares. “Your Body is a Wonderland” is everywhere. Radio loves you. You are transformed. What's that experience like?
JM: It's just a rocket ride.
RF: Were you ready for it?
JM: Yeah. Everything that happened, it made perfect sense to a guy like me. If you'd asked somebody from Fairfield Connecticut “what do you think is gonna happen to John?” He’d go “oh yeah, yeah absolutely.” He was going to hit it so hard that at first people are gonna go, "great job," and it was never gonna stop until he went off the rails.
Career and Negative Press (02:24)
RF: Do you think you went off the rails though? You use that term.
JM: Based on what my payload was; I didn't have a drinking problem. It was a thinking man's fiasco. It's a lot harder to explain to somebody. When you're 23 and you begin your life at the top of the chart and you've got that spunk and you go “bring on the world," and you go “okay here's a Grammy and here's an audience” and you got it. Now when you invariably do find out that not everything you touch turns to gold you've got a choice: you either bleed out or you tie off, right?
RF: So what's the point at which you tied off?
JM: I tie it off after I went alright dude you did you did a couple interviews where where you were out of touch and you were being a ham, and you were basically breakdancing into a nitroglycerin plant, right? Now you don't even have the chance that everybody's gonna love you ever again. They handed me the Playboy interview before it came out and I knew—you could have sat down in front of me and said: “John, that's not getting printed but I wanted you to know what would have happened had I not stopped that interview.”
RF: But do you think they shouldn't have printed that?
JM: No! I do think they should have printed it.
RF: You just think there's a place for that moment of mercy?
JM: Well you give it to yourself, you give it to yourself, you know, you got to give it to yourself. But you know, in that period of time I would have rather killed myself than been killed. I was never gonna wrap my Corvette around a tree, I was—my high speed crash was an intellectual one.
RF: What was the moment where you first thought “okay, this is not what I want to be known for?"
JM: Oh man, the first time somebody misunderstands you and says you're a womanizer.
RF: You don't consider yourself a womanizer?
JM: No. Absolutely not. But when you're crafty and you're clever and you go “well I'm just going to be as strange as they think I am so.” Okay now you're on TMZ and you're playing into the role, you're leaning into the role, right? Number one you're not playing music anymore, number two you're not feeling anything honestly, and number three you're not saying anything honestly.
RF: You once said you abuse the ability to express yourself.
JM: Oh, yeah.
RF: What's different now?
JM: Oh I know what I want. I don't care if this video gets 500,000 views or 50,000 views or 5,000 views. I'm not out to affect that anymore.
RF: That's for me to care.
JM: That's for you to care about, man.
RF: Are you susceptible yourself to wanting the Twitter feed back?
JM: yeah yeah that's why I pulled myself off of it again. I'm a recovered ego addict and the only way that I can be sure that I don't relapse is to admit that I constantly have this ego addiction every day. So I do the Grammys and I go home because if I stayed I'd get high again, and then I'd get high and then I'd get low.
RF: High on the approval?
JM: Yeah well yeah you've already looked throughTwitter everybody goes it's great and then you're low again because you can't stop looking, or you get low because you read the one negative thing. So I'm a recovered ego addict. Like this is not the first outfit I put on today—I'm admitting that because that's my AA for being an egomaniac.
RF: Are you gonna check Twitter after this interview?
JM: I will not check Twitter, but I checked the mirror, the original Twitter—I checked my mentions in the glass
RF: How has this changed since you broke?
JM: There's new technology, instant feedback now. The technology that I think I'm confident enough to say is hurting music is that musicians are very self conscious now, they're very self-aware. I see people sing and I go “they're hoping they do okay and they're gonna find out if they do okay.”
RF: They're looking for the feedback?
JM: They're singing whilst judging. They're performing for the Twitter mentions. They're just hoping that when they get in the car on the way to dinner they’re gonna—their faces lit up and they're checking to see if they did okay. I could go on a sermon if I wanted to but I just don't know how old fart it would sound. I just don't want to call BS on things that aren't for me.
You have two choices: you can look at Sam Smith and you can say you can be all cynical and go “well I knew Sam Smith when it was that, you go yeah but they don't.”
RF: Are you implying that Sam Smith is training wheels for people who haven't heard that kind of song?
JM: No I don't, I mean it. But if you wanted to be cynical you could listen to it and go “oh, I've heard that when it was X, Y, & Z," or something—and I'm kind of picking the guy out of a hat because I like Sam Smith and I would use Sam Smith as an example for so many great things. I go “oh, they're doing that again, like that's been done” but wait a minute, don't hold your age against other people, you know what I mean? Because it's the first time they've ever gone [sings a melody], and they go “I’ve never heard someone sing like that," you go “have it, I want you to have it.”
RF: You think it's getting worse?
JM: Yeah cause there's nobody to tell you what to do anymore. Artists overthrew the record company heads and the record company heads cannot tell an artist when to put a single up on their own, you know, put a clip of your song on SoundCloud. And they can say whatever they want can say what they want anytime they want there's no checks and balances.
Taylor Swift and Spotify (08:03)
RF: And how’s technology changing that when you look at say, Taylor Swift coming out and saying—and I’m talking about Taylor Swift professionally.
JM: We have to be able to talk about Taylor Swift professionally! [Laughs] We have to be able to talk about Taylor Swift.
RF: So tell me about that. When she comes out and says I'm not putting it on Spotify, right, that doesn't respect the artists and the writers enough.
JM: I think that's cool, I think that's really cool. Artists need the person with the loudest voice to speak for them and—
RF: Is she doing that?
JM: I think so. When you say that we can go to the Met Ball you know that's great, that's a great way to use your voices go I'm wearing Valentino, or you can use your voice to give things. Well now some people, the cynical, could say you're helping yourself but it's trickled down. You're not saying I want this just for me. I think that's a really cool thing for a musician to do like there's only like like two percent of the music industry has 80 percent of all the media about it, you know what I mean? There's like four people who get all the press and if any of those four people say I want to speak for the other people who just would never make this a story the only reason that we're talking about Taylor Swift taking Spotify on is because she's Taylor Swift and that's great.
RF: Does it bother you when you look at her or anyone else we're talking about in this conversation and they've got that side of their public.
JM: No, not at all, not at all. Nothing bothers me anymore man.
RF: Do you still have that emotional reaction, though?
JM: Uh, I check myself with it, but yeah yeah. There's gonna be times when I make music is as popular or empirically valuable as that in terms of making pop music that that won't make sell as many copies and I'm fine with that. You get to an age you go “look if I save a baby from a burning building and Kanye saves a baby from a burning building there's more Google News hits on Kanye," I'm fine with it.
RF: You and Kanye saving babies from building is a movie I’d wanna see.
JM: Now together, this is what I'm trying to tell you, is together we're unstoppable, but that's a great episode, that’s a new ER right there. But all we're talking about is like being honest with yourself and what to ask for in this life.
I put out a song called "Paper Doll." The song never got listened to as a song. It became a news story because of the lyrics.
RF: But you must have known that that's what it was going to become when you wrote it.
JM: I'm not in the business of telling people what the song's about. I never said anything about it but—and now I just go look, I can say the name "Taylor Swift," she's an artist, I'm an artist. Let's just everybody stop. Nobody's got an incurable cancer. We're rich people who get to live out our dreams, let's just stop it. I'm a musician who's bigger than one song or one record. So it's really more about the longevity of all the work that goes together, and I'm just not interested in the things that won't last forever.
Montana (10:55)
RF: What have you found in Montana?
JM: I just found home, man. And it gives you outside perspective. I'm gonna have one wife, a certain number of children, friends that are set, fans that will listen to the music that I make. And the greatest moment for me was giving up the big fight. The big fight to be this thing that gets off the airplane at LAX and floats through— and I have a lot I have a lot of admiration and like envy sometimes for people that large, you know. I'll be standing by the front desk sometimes being like, you know, anyone want to notice anybody won't notice me.
RF: Is there any part of you that still wants to be One Direction.
JM: Oh that's such a good question sure, but it wants to be One Direction via Neil Young.
RF: If you could say one thing to young John Mayer, say right before Room For Squares, what's that message?
JM: Just give him a hug I guess. There's nothing you can tell that kid. There's nothing you could tell that kid. Give him a hug and—I'd say that guy's really really talented but I don't want to be anywhere near when that thing goes off. This is what I would tell my young self, you are now my young self. What a handsome young me you are.
RF: I'm trying.
JM: There was never a shot of doing this perfectly, it was never in the cards. That's what I write people. I wrote—I don't wanna bring her into the conversation—I wrote this new up-and-coming Australian rapper, I don't want to give her name away because there's so many of them. So actually this is it, I said don't be upset that you're feeling like you're just an inch away from having your cake. Here this is the new way it's going to be they were never going to do it seamlessly.
RF: Success comes with hatred now.
JM: Yeah it just comes with yeah that's how we learn about things now. I write: “hey I'm John, I just want to let you know that this feeling you're having that you become successful but the world won't stop hating on you, this is not a broken version of success. This is the new version of success.
RF: So we're doing this series on genius and I promised you I would not put you in the position of describing yourself as a genius.
JM: I think I have proven through this interview that I am NOT a genius. There's this other side you get to—and you don't get there very often—I call it this other side where while you're writing you speak so much of your truth that you're even learning from it.
RF: John Mayer, it's like a therapy session every time I talk to you.
JM: Thank you, man. For who?
RF: And now it's America's therapy session.
JM: Wow, it's America’s. Three hundred and twenty five dollars, insurance doesn't cover it.