Introductory Remarks
Welcome to LIFE, with me, John Mayer. [...]
We are live and I cannot believe it. I have thought about you a lot since setting off on this adventure. The idea I have for this channel is not about bringing you into the studio with me. It's about me spending time with you, wherever you happen to be. [...] I've also fallen back in love with music as I've spent countless hours piecing together all the different hours of the day that specific music would fit. [...]
There's really is no better time to launch this channel than the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, which is such a unique day. The fact it doesn't have a name—it is its own holiday. You have a half day at school, you have a half day at work, if you go in at all. I don't think there is a single place in the country that isn't cloudy, every Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The sun goes down at like 4:30. [...]
I've really been looking at this channel—especially on your phone with an app, like a utility. Let me pull up this app, this is useful, this is a productivity app. So thank you so much for joining me on this exciting new adventure.
And let's begin. Welcome to Life, with me, John Mayer. [...]
I want to give you some contact information for me. Start with an email address:
lifewithjohnmayer@siriusxm.com
And we have a phone number. It's toll free, within the continental United States, I believe. Someone said we should do this at about $4 per minute, and I said not so fast.
1844-2-CALLJM [...]
The You I Miss
Caller: Will we ever hear the full version of "The You I Miss"?
JM: First question, you will hear unreleased music, like demos and even songs that have never seen the light of day on the channel. I will introduce them myself when I am sitting here live and then they will play on their own after that. [...]
Now as for the case of the song "The You I Miss." It's not really a song. It's a blessing and a curse to have put it up on Instagram. I put a small bit of this thing I was working on in the studio. I was so excited about it. It really is the bridge of this other song that never came out. It's really sounding like should play you the song at some point—not now—where that song lives. I really do want to put it into a song in the future, but as any fan of mine will tell you, the outlook is very hazy on my ever taking something that may have existed but never came to full fruition ever being heard again. Because I have so much to write in the moment that I don't like going back, necessarily. But I agree with you that that's a very good little hook. [...] I'll do my best to try to couch it at something bigger and better.
Your Body is a Wonderland
Caller: I wanted to talk to you about "Drone Shot of My Yacht." All those great jingles. Dude, how many of those have ever become real songs? You know, that ended up on the album? I mean, did Gravity start off as a jingle like that?
JM: I had no idea this question was gonna become this good when you started asking me this question. You flipped it with something deep and meaningful and it's going to force me to do the same in my answer.
I'm gonna try to do justice to the question with the answer: yes. I don't want to tell you exactly which songs. All right, I'm gonna tell you. When I first got a four-track recorder — back in the day before computers, there was a four-track recorder. Put a cassette in, and you couldn't see anything, you just had to kind of, in your head, imagine where the music was. You couldn't edit. I would write silly songs. By the way, this is how songwriters begin. They begin with jokey stuff. It's also the reason people who begin professionally with funny stuff, like standup comedians, they all eventually start putting out real music. Because that's where it all leads to.
I was in my parents' basement playing these silly little songs. I can't even tell you what the songs were about because they were so juvenile, sophomoric, and by today's standards—and, by the way, by the standards of the day I wrote them—just weird and probably borderline offensive. But when you're fourteen years old, you're just kicking around whatever ideas. And the entire verse of this silly song that I wrote, the entire melody and the cadence became the second verse for "Your Body is a Wonderland." I kid you not. So yes, the jingles do become things. What jingles teach me, is that it's not hard to write a song.
Sometimes when you're thinking, boy, I gotta write a big serious song, you choke up a little bit. But if you think, I gotta write something silly, the aperture is just so wide open that ideas just start coming out. So maybe what I'll do, and I'm not joking, is just think silly. Just write some silly stuff. Because I do write this stuff really fast. [sings] "844-2-CALL-JM."