Background on Paradise Valley
JG: What a warm sounding record. We were just talking, listening back to that. All the musicians were in the room?
JM: It's funny they say like all the musicians—it's basically a rhythm section. Basically me and a drummer and a bass player—or a keyboard player, also. So then I sort of stack on top, but it's really the stacking is only as good as sort of the heart and soul of the original take.
JG: And the bed of it was just live off the floor?
JM: It’s just us going for it, yeah.
JG: So we hear mistakes and you're cool with that?
JM: Yeah at this point in my career I am, and I used to think they were mistakes — like I hear that acoustic guitar and I go “well maybe that's not perfectly in tune on that a chord”, but what's what's really beautiful about it is that that guitar is the 1940 Martin 00-45. It's an incredible guitar in terms of sort of its pedigree and how old it is, and sort of soul in it. It would be like saying that 35-millimeter—like a shot from nineteen forty—isn't as crisp as a digital camera and you go, well it’s not supposed to be, but it has a lot of heart and soul in it.
JG: At this point in your career. So what changed? Why are you cooler with the mistakes being left on the tape now?
JM: I think I started to like mistakes. I think I started—well first of all I think we have to qualify “mistake.” A mistake would be something that you did not expect, right? So it's not really a mistake, it's something that falls out of your control. “I did not deem that. I wasn't going for that.”
You know, I think two things happened. Number one I started to get into music that was a lot more organic, a lot more sort of warts and all. And number two I had looked back on some of my own music where the intention was to be, uh, just great, you know, like I would try to be—got to be as great as it can be. And looking back on it now with those new sort of ears it can be sometimes a little antiseptic. So I remember making records where in the mixing stage I was saying bring that down, bring that down, that's unruly. Thinking to myself that's unruly and then looking back on it years later and going “well in your attempt to make it uniform and quote-unquote 'good' and 'in tune' and 'righteous,' it's a little flat."
JG: I mean—you're a lot of things—but you're also a pop music star. I mean, you won those Grammy Awards for pop album of the year. If you listened to pop radio, it is antiseptic.
It is that quantified kind of—so is there a tension between the guy that you know gets the radio hits and the guy that doesn't care about, you know, that kind of polish now?
JM: I don't know that there's tension but there's, I think, there's a good sort of compromise. I think now I have sort of unity with it. Like I am always going to be tempering the stuff that I love listening to with the artists that I want to be. And sometimes you listen to something you can appreciate and go, “that's great,” but know that it's not within your purview. And then you can listen to other things and go “I think I can quote-on-quote get away with—”
JG: What's an example of the former? What's something you listen to and go “I wish I could be that?"
JM: I would love a song like "Blurred Lines." I'd love to have "Blurred Lines," that’d be great, you know. I love the song, I'd love that track to belong to me and—
JG: But you don't have the dance moves?
JM: It’s not for me, it's not in my tool shed. So I think for me it's just a matter of understanding my range of possibility as an artist and always compare that with the range of things that I listen to.
So I'm into a lot of different music, I'm only really inspired by the things that I think that I can actually have something to do with if I were to output it myself.
So like, if you're listening to, like, Crosby, Stills & Nash, there's a lot of little bumps, and—because it's live—if you listen to, like, "Wooden Ships," you know, it's a gorgeous three-part sort of tune, there's an entire measure that's just a fret too low. But something weird happens, where if you listen to it long enough—and if you've listened to a lot of really well-charted stuff or, like, well-produced stuff for so many years, your ear sort of gets tired of it—you start realizing, like, that's a moment unto itself. I mean, isn't that as much of a hook as a memorable lyric is? If you go, “here comes the part where they—oh yeah," they sort of mark time in the song, you know what I mean?
JG: But to use your example of "Blurred Lines"—and not to take anything away from what it's undeniably a catchy, big pop hit—but that's the paragon of something that's hyper-produced for radio, wouldn't you say?
JM: No it's not, it's actually not. Like there we could go to so many other songs that are hyper-produced. I mean that song takes borrows heavily I would say from the song called "Got To Give It Up" by Marvin Gaye, you know. So I actually like where pop music is going where it's going to live instruments, like Chris Brown’s "Fine China", "Treasure" by Bruno Mars, "Get Lucky" by Daft Punk. These are like pop acts who for the last ten years have been behind drum machines realizing that live drummers have a lot more to do, there is a lot there's a lot more gush you can get, there’s a lot more movement I think we're all sort of realizing that things that breathe and move actual sound waves moving through the air is a lot more exciting.
Changes in Life and Career
JG: That sense of the organic is definitely something that we hear on this record and I know some of you—I actually want to talk about the recurring throat problem because that's been such a big issue view in the last couple years—but, and how that's affected you. Let me first ask you about this record. It's a strong record, John. It has some real country flourishes, some might say it's the work of a maturing artist.
JM: Cool.
JG: Would you say that?
JM: It's the work of a maturing person. So I guess if the art is relative to that then yeah. I guess it's the work of, I think, somebody who has proven a certain amount of acumen with being able to be fast and sharp and witty and quick and clever, who's a little bored, a little tired. A little tired of that sort of speed. You get old.
When I was nineteen and—you’re a broadcaster so you'll know this very well—when you first sort of get out of high school or you get out of college and you're armed with all of these words. You're armed with this vocabulary—it's not even really a vocabulary yet, it's just a whole bunch of words. You spend a good amount of time just seeing how fast and articulate can you be.
You don't want to talk to a poli-sci [political science] student who's twenty-one years old right now because it's maddening because they're right now in a state of still experimenting with that kind of articulation. You have to experiment with that for at least five or ten years to the point where you can sit back, you've written a couple of strong books on the subject, and then be able to sort of lean back in the chair, speak a little slower, and have some trust slash, maybe respect—that's another word for respect is trust—in the quality that someone's capable of and then you begin to want to explore what you're capable of doing with a little bit less gas. And the best analogy I can think of is: okay you want to be able to drive slow enough so you yourself can look out the window and take in the ambiance.
JG: Beautifully said, but there's a few things that I would ask in response to you saying, using that metaphor and saying that. First of all, I mean, is this a way of saying you feel less like you have to prove yourself?
JM: Yeah sure I mean I came up feeling like you have to—and you're a musician, as you said before we went on air—you want your work to be a calling card for your abilities.
Everybody who starts out needs to have their work represent their abilities. The extent of—the totality of their abilities—or else they may not make it.
So if you're going to make your first record, it's got to be almost like a sampler of what you're capable of doing so that you can possibly wedge your name and your music or your work into people's minds. I feel like the work that I've done is still sort of lingering in the air for my fans and for, you know, for the public quote-unquote. So I don't need to do another song where I de-tune the low e-string and slap and do these sort of counterpoint countermelody things so that people can go “wow he can do that.”
I kind of feel like by having done it you've proven the capacity for life to be able to do that, and so what I'm really interested in now is can I write a song that is simple without people believing that I am simple or that's the extent of my complexity.
JG: Would you also say then that you've mellowed?
JM: Oh, yeah.
New Songwriting Inspiration and Directions
JG: I mean this is, you know, there's a guy on the front cover of your record you got a hat on you're walking through—I guess it's Montana?
JM: That's Montana.
JG: You’re in a field, you got a dog. You know, that's not exactly the Viper Room.
JM: That's right, that's right. And you know you can look at life two ways. One of them is that, you know, once you find it you have to keep mining it, and the other one is once you find it you keep a small part and you put it in your stash bag and it's a small piece of moving on. And you can say, yeah I did that. So I have memories—I have records, I have live shows, I have all these things that a lot of people don't have in their life that can stand to kind of prove who they were and where they were. And this is sort of an extension of the music that I've been taking in that's simpler, that works off a little bit of a different song form.
Because [Paradise Valley is] not really country in the sense that I'm not singing through my nose any more than I did before. There's no different inflections in the vocals whatsoever. But really what makes it different from the other records—and what's made every record different from one another—is that as a writer I get really interested in song form. Think of it like the skeleton of a song.
You can write a pop song that has a verse, B section, and a big chorus. Or, one day you listen to "Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright."
If you've heard enough pop songs with a verse, B section, chorus, verse, B section, chorus, bridge, quiet chorus—boom, big chorus! At some point in your life you intersect with this idea of: verse verse verse verse verse verse verse, and you go, wow that's really cool. You kind of break free as a writer. Bob Dylan, you know, coming from the Woody Guthrie thing, of the verse/refrain—
JG: But Dylan's a good example—maybe "country" isn't the right word. Rootsier.
JM: Sure. American song form.
JG: What you’re doing, it sounds like roots. Sounds like, you know, we're in the barn here. To a certain extent. And you like that?
JM: I love it.
JG: It there any part of you John that feels like, by no longer embracing a faster pace John Mayer lifestyle that you would lose something artistically?
JM: You have to be a little more specific about “something”.
JG: Meaning like I'm sure you can think of some musicians who you thought were great earlier in their career and then they mellowed and got kind of lame. Uninteresting.
JM: Okay I like it.
JG: Do you have any fears of that when you're out in the field in Montana?
JM: Oh no, no, because if it's the direction you have to be going in—and I've, by the way, I've always followed my own sort of compass. My first record was extremely successful but it wasn't by any means formulaic for the times. I have always had lucky hits. At no time that I've ever released a record could anybody have said “well that's a very calculated move.”
When my first record came out, I was being —when I was shopping my first record—I was told “sorry that's POD, Incubus—Vertical Horizon was as close to singer-songwriter there was on the radio, so I was always told “yeah you're sort of the outcast here. I don't know how I can bring you to my boss.” I was told a dozen times “I love it, I don't know how I can bring you to my boss.” So I've never really had much of a reason to do the same thing twice because there was never a war room strategy meeting where we said “oh well we've got to be the flavor of the day.” I have collided accidentally with success in pop music from time to time.
JG: So you're not Clapton, who, you know—
JM: In many ways I am not.
JG: [Laughter] In the terms of the mellowing thing.
JM: Yeah I mean this for me is as ambitious as my first record was. The rest of it as to whether it's successful—this is not out yet. It could be my second biggest record sales-wise, it could be my fourth biggest record sales wise and my first biggest record in terms of what matters to people live in concert and what they want to hear. So I don't have a reason to be scared, you know? I've had no point of reference or someone saying to me “well you don't you don't want to lose that thing you had,” because nobody ever guaranteed me that what I had was going to be the thing based on the metrics of the day, you know.
"Paper Doll"
JG: The Paper Doll thing, that was the single and there's all this debate about what that song is about. How do you feel about people trying to dissect lyrics like that?
JM: It's a different time, right? Like you'd be called an old fart if you were to say like, well, why can't we listen to records on vinyl? Or why can't we listen to records on CD? Why can't we take this music in this way, right? Well, why Spotify? Whatever happened to good old Pandora? And along those lines you could be considered the same thing for saying, why can't people just listen to the song? Why can't people just listen—
JG: That's your disclaimer?
JM: Yeah well sort of—it's actually not really a disclaimer it's kind of an explainer.
JG: Okay.
JM: So in saying that I want to be the same way and embrace—like if that's the way people like to be to have music introduced to them, taped to a little nugget of BS. That's sort of the method of delivery now for information where I come from. So if you're not hearing something based on a controversy, or based on a debate, or based on something polarizing, you may not hear it, right?
So like, "Roar" comes out, right? Katy [Perry] puts out the song called "Roar," and it can't just come out. It can't just come out. It has to be a debate about whether or not—and it's a really specious sort of a debate because it doesn't ever get to the fact, it never gets to the accusation. Never gets to, “well what are you saying, is it stolen?" "No it's not stolen.” So it's just enough BS to sort of add—it's an added value for people. I think about it this way, like people need an added value especially on the Internet where there has to be another multimedia facet to it. You can't just put a song out and go, “here's John Mayer's new song called 'Paper Doll,' listen to it.” People need some other manner of intrigue to make it feel like—
JG: But also because you're a big star. Isn't that part of it? Or Katy as well. I mean, because there’s a whole narrative around you.
JM: But the narrative now has to be some sort of—the propulsion for a product now, it has to be some other sort of head-scratching nail-biting intrigue. “Click and see what you think." It's no longer, “Do you like this song." It's “Do you think there are nefarious underpinnings —”
JG: Mixed with, I would argue, what I call the culture of outrage. Everything's about outrage now, Twitter, everything's—what can we find that everyone’s pissed off about.
JM: And if you look at it on that continuum right, then I'm just downright quaint if you're a songwriter and people are trying to wonder who the song is for. Now this is where it got even weirder, I can't say that it's a new thing that anybody wondered who a song is about. That's a hundred year question, who's that about, who's this about. The weird sort of little twist in it in the last five years is “who is the song for?” As if the song has one intended recipient, as if we don't have emails or phones that we're all sort of in laboratories now with broken hearts wringing our hands together going, “wait until that one person hears this in the car.”
It would be a gross abuse of talent to say, “well yeah I have millions of fans that I love and can't wait till they hear my new record, but out of the way for a minute. I got a message to say.” I don’t lob songs—I've never in my life written a song for somebody, or to somebody.
JG: Layla, you've never had a Layla?
JM: That's about somebody.
JG: Sort of for somebody.
JM: But for means there's a "to" and a "from." And that I'm sending you a message or that the world becomes a spectator to these two people, the writer and the listener.
So where it's become very interesting for people—and I feel like I'm in some way protected by—at least in this conversation, God knows as soon as it leaves this conversation it's open for anybody to sort of sling arrows at it—but I think people are intrigued by to songwriters who have in people's minds this sort of colored history in some way that goes beyond just being songwriters together. People are very intrigued by the idea that these two songwriters will forever be writing songs back and forth to each other. And if that's exciting for people you got—[looks back at studio door] you probably got people—[makes hand motion suggesting knocking down door].
JG: Can we have an extra five minutes?
JM: But anyway that's my answer by "Paper Doll." People are very—and I don't want to tell anybody hey don't do that, that would be like me saying like “don't listen to it on Spotify, listen to on Pandora.”
If somebody hears a song and they get into it and they want to get into the lyrics and they want to get into the tenor of the verse and the vibe of the chorus and that stuff and it's getting lit, I hate to say it like that because the question would be like would you rather not have them think that and not hear your song I don't know that's like the way that people enjoy music now is to wonder where and why and how and look into the personal life. It's the exact—I don't know if it's the opposite—but it has nothing to do nothing to do with what we do is musicians when we're in the studio.
JG: There's another way to enjoy music and that's to actually enjoy the song.
JM: Segging out!
"I Will Be Found" and the Piano
JG: We were talking about being ambitious on this record before, and I thought it was really sweet that—I didn't know this just before we went to air—and I told you that my favorite song right now is "I Will Be Found." And I said you wrote it on the piano? And you said yes. And that’s the first song you've ever written on the piano.
See, I wanted to play that, because that feels a bit like a McCartney song and it's really—
JM: I am not at liberty to agree with you.
JG: Why?
JM: I can't say “yes, that’s good ears. I was thinking more Lennon-esque."
JG: Your first song on the piano you've written. So was that scary?
JM:It was scary once I learned that this is a good enough song to finish and record. I've always played the piano since I was a kid, but I have my own untaught—not even self-taught—just untaught sort of approach to it. And you know, musicians have always said, you pick up another instrument you don't know and it sort of pulls other ideas out of you. So I'm really only capable of playing the key of C. But there was some other different sort of—there's some real poly-chordal stuff there where, like, I don't think if I knew how to play the piano I would ever put a D under a B-flat.
Like, you just wouldn't because you never learned to do it. So there's these fun little moments where I go, “oh, that's nice sounding," they're almost dissonant. And then I started singing over it. As soon as I sang, "I'm a little lost at sea / I'm a little birdie in a big old tree / ain't nobody looking for me here out on the highway," I went "oh no." And the "oh no" of it is, like, I now have this one moment to have to live up to in the rest of the song because it's too good an idea. And it's always when it's like a B-sectiony sort of thing, it just screws you.
JG: You did it, though. The verses are really strong, too.
JM: Thank you.
JG: But it almost feels like what you're saying, you know, you're too good a guitarist to be able to as easily discover new musical paths the way you do on a piano because you're more novice at piano.
JM: Yeah well I'm—thank you about the guitar thing—I probably only have two piano songs in me my entire life, and they have to be in the key of C. I do a lot of piano overdubs on stuff, but I have to really sit there and calculate it and punch in and sometimes there's sometimes things that are like harmonies but they're me playing single note. Some things a keyboard player can do as a keyboard player, somethings only I can do. I sort of have to sit there in the dead of night literally and—well not literally the dead of night because that would mean that—the dead of night would be a great title for a zombie movie.
[Laughter]
Throat Condition and Personal Growth
JG: Let me ask you about your throat.
JM: Yeah. Do you ask all your guests that question? This is a segment on your show, “let me ask you about your throat.”
JG: Well sadly I don't, but it's really harrowing even reading about what you've been through. So I mentioned earlier this album marks the return after a throat condition that jeopardize your singing career. You've made this, it seems like a remarkable recovery, but at one point this is just last year you were unable to speak for several months?
JM: Yeah I went in and out of vocal rest, complete vocal rest.
JG: For a famously outspoken guy. How did you cope with that? How how did you—
JM: I thought—yeah, sorry?
JG: How did you cope with that emotionally?
JG: Your emotions sort of freeze. It's hard to explain. When you know you're in a situation that's a unidirectional thing where there's no other option but to go through it, your emotions sort of shore up. So I got very—I don't even know the way to describe it. And I’m still sort of going through it now whereas I go on stage and saying I'm worried that I'm not going to be able to sing you just take it as another strange chapter in a hopefully more interesting life, you know, overall. It's hard to explain man. I don't think I'm ever going to articulate it right.
JG: Were you freaked out?
I mean you used to get anxiety, right?
JM: Yeah, no.
JG: This would be like panic attack central for me.
JM: No this was the exact opposite. Panic attack central for me is when I've got nothing to worry about so I'm one of these weird guys who sits around and everything's great I stare at the wall and it's as soon as I realize everything's great I then begin to dismantle myself because I'm bored. I don't panic when I've got real problems. You know, shout out to everyone else nodding along listening and going “that's me too.” There's two types of panickers, you know. One of them's, like, Get me off this plane, and the other one’s, like, Get me off this beautiful island.
It's like when things are still I get a little weird. So when I had a real struggle or—and you know it's also not a cancer, it was never life-threatening. It was also never career threatening. It's just year threatening or years threatening,
JG: Meaning because you knew the voice would come back?
JM: Yeah I was told everyone I went to it was never a harrowing issue of whether I'd ever be on stage again. It was just a big fat pause button. So maybe that was the saving grace was knowing that basically my future was an escrow but it was like a trust fund that was going to come back to me. It was just a matter of when. So I really just kind of handled this situation—also I was kind of every two years was broken up into little four months hope nuggets and at the end of each four month “oh that didn't work”, you just go into another one like “this has got to work, this has got to work," so really like six or eight separate attempts to make it go away that didn't go away. And so I had bought this place in Montana that was going to be my little getaway spot in between tours, and then when I couldn't go on tour I said “well I might as well move in.”
JG: When you go through something like that you're literally unable to speak. The stories of you at the Starbucks not able to order the coffee, and you sequester yourself in Montana—I mean all of these are the ingredients of turning a chapter in one's life or of a learning experience. What would you say that that period of isolation taught you?
JM: To listen again, to dream all over again. It was a clean slate of dreaming. It is possible and we’re not very trusting of it, we're very dubious of it and I think I understand why. We're not very trusting of quantum change, you know. We see someone sort of like come back or but their next record they're wearing something different—it's a very dubious thing. Like, Oh, I don't buy it. But I've actually witnessed that quantum change is like really possible—not very often in one person's life, but very often in the sense that everybody can do it. And it happens in your life at one point or another—a couple times—where you're really capable of like wiping the slate clean almost like a neuro-plasti kind of like a neuroplasticity thing where you can really change your thinking. I don't think I would have ever held so tight to a regimen if I wasn't forced to not speak.
So it would be like saying “John is going to go to a monastery where he's not going to speak and he's going to take up some of the other cultures where they don't speak.” I would have given it up. So for me it was like this imposed—not self-imposed—but it was a really externally imposed change in my life that I noticed. Like over time my brain was changing with it, you know. Some of it’s not great, you know like I still worry that I'm gonna wake up tomorrow my voice isn't gonna be there.
JG: But when you say it allowed you to dream again.
JM: Yeah.
JG: What did you dream about?
JM: Being an artist.
Being an artist and exactly how I was going to be.
JG: To re-embrace your passion for being an artist?
JM: To embrace a new passion, same embrace, new passion. New approach. What was working, what wasn't working. When you get off a tour and have to think about an album — because the truth is even when they tell you have a year off, you kind of don't have a year off. The clock is still sort of ticking down. But you have all this time to really shut down the momentum — the wheel stops, doesn't slow, it just stops. And so you have a lot of time to go “what did I like about me? What did I originally set out to be as an artist? Why was I behaving that way?” Well if you keep looking at you, well, I hated it. I hated that part of it. Instead of saying I hated that part of it I decided I was gonna try and outsmart it or be like, trying to be funny. Or if I was uncomfortable I'd become insincere. Now I'm just sincerely uncomfortable. You know, so at the same time I was also hit by like, Bob Dylan's music, Neil Young's music, Grateful Dead's music.
The sort of freer, more open, carefree sort of styles of music. And I think a lot of people are into that right now. Sort of carefree. We spent a lot of the last ten years caring—hyper-aware—caring what the image was, caring how we looked, caring how everything went, you know, and—
JG: Were you part of that? Did you—
JM: Oh yeah man, yeah we worried. I worried, you know, is this picture gonna last forever on the internet? No. Is the way that this person thinks about me going to last? No. So I've actually come back and I'm excited to play tonight's show. I can't wait to play tonight's show. I'm now for the first time my life's saying to my tour manager, Ken, I'm going like “hey let's do 'Queen of California' into 'Vultures' tonight”, you know, that's an embrace that I've never really had of a tour. So I'm living the dream part two, you know.
JG: Alright, before I let you go let me just put this to you, a couple more questions. There's a song on this album—this does have a sort of classic country sound. It's called You’re no ‘til somebody—you’re no one ‘til someone lets you down.
JM: Ah. “You’re No One ‘Til Someone Lets You Down”, yeah.
JG: And you sing in this the lyric: ‘I've been told that some people grow old without losing part of their soul.”
JM: Mhm.
JG: Is your soul still intact?
JM: Yeah, yeah.
JG: Or do you feel like you had to pay a price for your achievements.
JM: Intact. Intact. You know I had other grafts, but not a soul graft. I think my intellect took a huge hit. My soul is all there. Thank God. I mean and you think about how hard it is to retain that. I have a lot of great people around me, I have a pretty good self regulator in my brain—believe it or not—I have a pretty good cause and effect processor. It's just that sometimes it's a huge cause and a huge effect. But when you think about other people who don't have as—I mean I've got like abundance of self awareness, but if you if I had any less than I do, if I had any less of a great group of people around me than I do, if I had any less sort of desire to sort of do things correctly even if I do them incorrectly first, I would have been washed away, man.
So you get a lot — I have a lot of respect for people in this industry. A lot of people are just navigating based on their compass and if the magnets are a little off you're screwed. You know like if you shoot for the moon and you're like a nanometer off by the time you get to the moon the moon's nowhere near. So my soul is intact. Some of my navigational equipment hasn't always been dead on, but I can tell you this man—and I passed the lie detector test—at every step of the way thought I was taking the step forward. And so that's how you keep your soul intact, you know?
JG: Well we started towards beginning of the interview you said that you don't feel like you have anything to prove as much anymore and you've said in the past your motivation is to prove people wrong and to confuse them. Have you let go of that?
JM: Oh yeah confusing them was my way of—well first of all you probably didn't couldn't confuse anybody just confused yourself. Yeah, you know, right before you start crying you rip your shirt off and say I'll I'll kick anyone's ass. You know, and so that's always right before you lose it, there's always that last little burst of “bring it on.” But um, no one ever tells you to give up. We don't live in a society where people say “hey give up on some of your dreams.” You know, and for me some of the greatest sort of like evolution for me came out of going like “alright I'll give that up. Alright fine, you win. Mercy. I'll give it up.”
I take such smaller bites of what it is I want to be and I think that I'll probably hopefully be more appreciated for asking for less of people's time and attention and just say, Hey Paradise Valley is a wonderful record if what you're into is a Sunday morning vibe. If you want to drink bourbon with a friend, if you want to drive a friend to the airport and listen to a record, I'm your guy. I'm not trying to put myself front and center in everyone's eyeline anymore. I had to figure out that that wasn't my calling by attempting to do it and now here I am when you want to vibe out in that direction. Come to a show one summer if that's the way you want to groove. If you've heard a little too much club music—and I'll go up and down and then people will hear too much of this and want to hear something made on a machine and I will too. Maybe I'll do that someday. Maybe my next record is, uh club cuts with a “z”, and two “k’s”. “Klub Kutz.”
JG: Real pleasure getting to talk to you. Congrats on the record.
JM: Thank you. It was a cool interview.