COVID-19

But I'm so lucky to see you guys tonight. I also wanted to say hello to everyone all around the world watching. At this point there's no time and space. There's no space because everybody's is going through his thing synchronously. And there's no time because there's not really much to hold time in place throughout the day. So you can really text anybody any time you want now. If you'e been feeling this one, you can text someone at three o'clock in the morning. It's not rude because it's like, you're up, they're up. 

Everyone basically has a newborn baby. Everyone is living the life of having a newborn baby. But to everyone in other countries, please stay strong. Please, please, please. The only redeeming thing, and I mean maybe the only redeeming thing—no I do mean the only redeeming thing right now—is that everyone is going through this together. The entire world is going through this thing together. I hope you've found some peace in that. Because I have.

What am I sipping on? I'm actually sipping on a beverage that apparently, unfortunately, cannot solve this crisis and therefore I am not mentioning it.

John Mayer: If you're going to talk to me after 9 PM, don't try to frighten me.

Dave Chappelle: John, all of my phone calls are terrifying.

JM: All of my calls are terrifying. And I just don't need it in my life. What I'm trying to tell my viewers to do—my friends, to do—is that you have to switch to local at a certain hour. Where it's only you.

DS: Someone just commented that we're giving them anxiety. Will you man the fuck up? Jesus Christ. It's only been five days. Will you relax?!

JM: You're like the story that everyone heard about growing up of the boy who can't feel pain.

BS: I do think I had it. Do you think you had it, by the way?

JM: Yeah, I think I had it. 

BS: You had a flu that just knocked you on your ass.

JM: But I think I had it in December. So I don't know if that makes sense. I don't want to be one of these guys who says he thinks he had it. But I sure would like to take an antibody test.

Andy Cohen: That dinner Friday night, I gotta tell you—it was your first time in a restaurant, eating, in a year, right?

John Mayer: Over a year, yeah. This is my first time in New York in over a year.

AC: Wow. And you're here why?

JM: I came because I have not seen my dad since over a year ago, and he got vaccinated. And so as soon as he got that, a week after the second dose, I was on a plane out to see him.

AC: And he is 94?

JM: He's 93. So, you know, there's no good year to lose to the pandemic, but when you're in your nineties, the years become more valuable. So the fact that I didn't see him for a whole year—and I gotta say, I am the luckiest human being, that my dad, who's in an assisted living home in New York City, during the pandemic, literally survived. It's not dramatic to say, he survived. And I know how many people can't say that. So the value in that, and the luck in that—and it is luck! It is not a meritocracy. People didn't survive because they were better than another person. So it is just pure lottery luck that my dad literally survived. And it was a very heavy thing to see him again and know that, at 93, we lost a year, but he's still here.

JM: You know what I think? I'm experiencing a little bit of a return to normality. It's like one step out of a hundred steps to normality, just to have dinner on Friday night. I really think that we're going to have to sort of rebuild our stamina for going out. I find now, when I go out, an hour will do me. Because we've sort of bonded with being alone, and there's a little Stockholm syndrome, where you're like, I want to go back to my cage now. Do you know what I mean?

AC: I totally do. And the thing is, [my son] Ben has just made that really—I just want to be home with Ben and I want to put him to bed every night. And I do put him to bed every night. So then, he goes to bed at 8, so then, am I gonna go out to dinner at 8? I mean, that is typically when I would go out. 8 or 8:30. I don't know, but—

JM: We're gonna have to rebuild the conditioning, to go to dinner and go out after that. Because we're so used to feeding ourselves socially, or entertainment-wise. So we're on our own schedules now, and it's like, well, I gotta be in the living room in ten minutes to do this thing that I wanna do! So now, I feel like we're really gonna have to go half an hour at a time over a series of months.

Don Was: There was a period just after Christmas and before the vaccine was available to us when there was a spike in new cases of Covid. Going to the studio was deemed to be too risky so we set up a control room in a tent in your backyard and finished the album in there! I've been making records for 40 years and that was a first!

When we first went in the lock down—I don't know if you guys had the same experience—I had no music inside me. I was in a very kind of objective tactical mindset. And that plays no music in my head.