Berklee

John Mayer explained how this seemingly isolated musical grounding allowed him to concentrate on perfecting his craft and that students’ time at Berklee is perfect for this same level of focus.

“This time is a really important time for you guys because nobody knows who you are, and nobody should. This is not a time to promote yourself. It doesn’t matter. This is the time to get your stuff together. Promotion can be like that. You can have promotion in 30 seconds if your stuff is good. Good music is its own promotion.”

Interviewer: I want to talk about the short time you spent at Berklee College of Music, leaving Berklee College, but choosing not to stay in Boston where there’s a very active singer-songwriter scene, and instead just moving to Atlanta?

John Mayer: It was just a matter of wanting to get out of an area where there are so many musicians that it was kind of hard to find an audience, or at least I felt that way. It wasn’t ever a sort of condescending leaving Berklee. I left there a musical idiot in terms of what I could have been learning for another three years. But it was a matter of, you know, I just want to start playing for audiences. Where’s the real thing? When does boot camp end and the real battle begin?

Interviewer: Did you play out in Boston?

JM: Not at all.

Interviewer: So you didn’t even try and find a place there where it’s tough to find a place?

JM: It’s a pretty small circuit and there are so many musicians up there that it’s just a whole bunch of people giving each other paper cuts as they hand each other their fliers. I think college communities are very isolated, they're very exclusive. If you go to BU [Boston University], you live at BU and you’re not going to find your way down to Berklee or you’re not going to find your way to other parts of the street. It becomes very, very isolated. It becomes very difficult to get to those people, you know?

When the idea of going to Berklee came up, I had dropped songwriting for the moment. I never thought of going to Berklee to become a great songwriter; I wanted to learn how to be the best guitar player going. I went for the first semester with that in mind. You confront your own identity right away when you go to Berklee. Some people never saw who they were until they got there. Some had been told by their parents and others that they were great, and it took coming out of the Midwest or someplace else for them to hear other kids playing. I learned a lot hearing other kids who were better players than I was.

It was over the Christmas break that year that I took a hard look at myself and decided to figure out where the target was and how close I was to it. That’s when I realized that I was meant to be a songwriter or a mainstream artist. The best thing I could tell anybody at Berklee is to define your expectations. Life is so much easier when you do that.

Otherwise you don’t know when you’ve hit the mark. Going back for the second semester was interesting for me. I knew that I wanted to be a listenable artist. I wanted to be the guy that the best guitar players at Berklee wanted to hear when all the music in their heads was driving them nuts. I wanted them to come to my room and let me play them a song. That was when I figured out that writing songs was my calling.

The fall of '97 and the spring of '98 were two very different semesters. The first semester, I wanted to be the best guitar player I could possibly be. . . . But I never felt like I connected with anything or anybody because I just wanted to be the best. It was an expectation that was so broad that it was indefinable and therefore, unreachable.

The first era of my songwriting began January and February of my second semester. I can't say I went to class as much as I should have. There was something happening. There was this definition of myself, of my identity. All of a sudden, I found this perfect balance for Berklee. Here's the information coming in, here's the inspiration going out. And this is the title of my clinic. I want to call it 'Inspiration/Information.' It is the perfect way to delineate how Berklee is right, how Berklee can work. Your hardest job here is to convert that information into your inspiration.

Interviewer: We'll live up to those expectations. You attended one of the most prestigious colleges in the United States, Berklee College of Music in Boston; what was that like and how has that shaped your career? 

JM: Well, you know, I attended it—I always need to make sure that I add that I didn't go for very long. I went for a year. But it was really great, and it wasn't great in a way that would be reflected in any sort of transcripts, but that was music anyway. Music’s not supposed to be reflected in transcripts, necessarily. And it was really great to come from a town where I was one of the only two kids we even played a guitar and all of a sudden become assimilated into 5,000 guitar players. That was really interesting to go from the bedroom into a city that was, you know, basically this amalgam of just musicians, guitar players, drummers, singers—all these people want to do the same thing you want to do.

And for me it was like, I didn't really get into the curriculum at all, but the sort of humanity study of it all was what was really great for me as a musician because I got to see what everybody was gunning for, how everybody saw themselves, what the race was for, how everybody visualized what success was or how they visualized themselves. And so the first semester—I went for two semesters—in the first semester was a really rigid idea that I was going to be the best guitar player, I was just going to go to become the best guitar player. Then I realized that that's a very sort of like, there's no real way to define what that is anyway. 

And so I went home for a Christmas break and really thought about what it was I wanted to do and realized oh I don't if you're a guitar player if you're only a guitar player who's trying to be the best guitar player then you're only fans are going to be fans of that sport you can't really transcend very few guitar players do and then I realized I remember saying to myself oh I want to be listenable you know I want to be listenable I want actually I remember thinking like I want this entire student body to become my audience you know and that flipped a switch and unfortunately didn't include Berklee so much in that mission statement anymore, but it was really great—I've made friends that I still have there and just being able to communicate in this very sort of singular language of having this dream with other people who also have that dream is a huge part of the picture of making it.

Interviewer: You might presuppose my next question, so you moved from Berklee in Boston to Atlanta. That’s sort of your way of trying to get into that new idea? 

JM: Yeah I remember thinking I don't need the instructions anymore. Some people go for four years, “I get it, I get it, I get it, I get it, give it to me, give it to me, I got it, I got it stop reading, stop reading the manual stop, reading the manual, I get it, I get it.” And from there, cause I started writing songs when I was at Berklee. See I started ditching class to write songs at Berklee and I guess looking back on it I needed the fuel of that sort of rebellion to kind of push off from and really become something. So I was sleeping through classes and staying up at night recording demos in my room and then I realized, oh I get it this is what I got to go do. 

And I had made a friend there who lived in Atlanta and said “hey let's withdraw together and go the in act in Atlanta.” And so we did and I remember the day I walk down the street in Boston and I went and I withdrew and they give you a sheet of paper. The canary copy is there's, pink copy’s yours. See you later. And I walk down the street with it going like, what have I done?

And I remember I walked into a bump into my one of my guitar instructors who was like “I don't see you in class anymore," and I said “yeah I'm not going to class any more lately.” And I said I just withdrew as a matter of fact. And the very first moment that I learned possibly I was going to be okay was he said “well man, you're a phenomenal player and if you—" sort of like, when your teacher says to you, yeah I get it, hit the road man. Go do it. That was really huge. He said "if you ever need to come back I'll change your grade, but go get it done." 

RY: And sometimes those songs, like you said, come out, like "Go Easy on Me," which I like a lot. 

JM: I love that song, man. Love that song. I remember white boarding that. I do a lot of white boarding. It’s like math to me. And Berklee taught me a lot about that stuff. Songwriting class, Pat Pattison. Teaching rhyme schemes. If you have a verse one and a verse two, and you have verse one done, but you don’t have verse two, chart the rhyme scheme. 

"A A X A—" write it down next to the lines you don’t have. It’s like a crossword puzzle.

The whole event was set up as a master class to reflect a typical songwriting class at Berklee. Five other songwriting students and I all brought in an original song to be played for feedback and critiques. The lyrics were projected on a screen for other students and the professor to follow along to. For this specific event, John Mayer was the professor. I was blown away by his knowledge and passion for songwriting. He had said, “Each song is like a tree house. You spend all this time creating a new place that never existed before. It’s a place built by you, for you, and is a place you can retreat to.” He was right. As songwriters we go into this trance while we’re writing. It’s as if we temporarily live in a different world that is only ours to inhabit.

SJ: Berklee. Did you like it? Take it or leave it? Love it, hate it?

JM: Loved it for reasons that they probably shouldn't put in the brochure. I'm a big believer in make something out of everything you're involved in and make it your own no matter what. I appreciated being around that many musicians. I have a problem with curriculum. I have a clinical curriculum problem. Whereby day three I'm lost. Day one I'm with you. Day three I feel like I was in a coma and was wrestled out of it in time for day fifty, but it's just day three.

SJ: [Laughing]

JM: That's what curriculum feels like to me. I can't understand it. "Now take what we learned last Tuesday about the FOIL method in math, and apply it to that to this—," I went, I can't do that.

So I very quickly lost the path of being a student. Immediately.

SJ: Right. But using the facility. And the other musicians. Using it as your own curriculum. 

JM: That's right. I started writing songs immediately. The first semester I was there I wanted to be the best guitar player. Cause that's what everybody thinks cause they're in their small town. Like every town in America, if not the world, has the best guitar player. Everyone knows who the best guitar player is in their town. I'm sure this applies to other instruments, but there's something totemistic about the electric guitar. People tend to talk about it more than others. 

SJ: Exactly. "Clapton is god, etcetera." 

[Laughter]

JM: But the point is, everyone comes and they join up and they realize they're not the best.

I'll never forget where I was when I realized I want to be the guy who played the song for the master musician who's tired of working all day and wants to hear a melody. Wants to hear a tune. And I realized that that's going to be my only way to win, because there are so many guitar players. And I do believe that if you took me out of my compositions and just put me in some uniform competition as a guitar player I'm forgotten.