Chad Franscoviak

So Battle Studies reflects both Mayer's new and unasked-for status, and his need to allow his work to stand as an honest and open response to who he is and where he finds himself. Little wonder he had to construct his own fortress of solitude in which to start creating it. He and his engineer, long-time friend Chad Franscoviak, built a studio in a rented house in suburban Calabasas, as much for practical reasons as artistic ones. The house is on a private street some distance from public roads, so hard to find that when TV stations decided to track him down and helicopters started broadcasting footage, they were actually showing a neighbour's roof.

And I think I was tinkering around with a guitar and I went [singing and playing guitar] "Who says I can't get stoned, [scatting] duh na duh na the shades alone, who says I can't get stoned."

It was lovely. And I'd always played it for the last three years straight—to my friend and roommate and front of house engineer Chad Franscoviak—and I would say, check this out, [plays part of "Who Says"].

He would say, you need to do that. You need to do that. And I went, I'm nervous about the stone thing.

Chad and I have been friends since the year 1999.

The music that would accompany the song’s key lyric took longer to come to him, and he initially wrote an entirely different tune of the same name. Last September, on the day after he’d played in the house band at the 2016 Emmy Awards, Mayer arrived at the studio, “slightly hungover,” to record a guitar part for another track. “There was some really washy reverb on the guitar, and I started playing this line and I just went, ‘Hey, press record,'” says the singer, who worked on the demos alone with his longtime engineer Chad Franscoviak. “I realized it was going to be the song I didn’t have for the record yet, which was looking forward to something – discovering somebody, the beginning of the relationship. Because all these other songs were about being dropped off into the loneliness, and you can’t mourn that long.

The first week we were here, we had an assistant in the room and I worked a little bit but didn’t get very far. So I said, ‘We have to kick everybody out and it just has to be me and Chad.’ He’s the only guy who I can really write in front of.