Throat Condition

GR: John Mayer has dealt with other problems too. Last year, he developed a noncancerous nodule near his vocal cords called a granuloma. It required surgery and a grueling recovery process. A few months ago, the granuloma returned, and it's caused him to cancel his upcoming tour and start all over again.

JM: I'm not in recovery at the moment. I'm actually in a holding pattern until I can get the wherewithal, the discipline back again, the endurance to go through a six-month period of extreme self-discipline.

GR: Which means what? What, no talking or--

JM: Well, yeah. Well, there's no talking for the first month, probably.

GR: Oh, wow.

JM:And then there's whispering. But, really, what this has to do with is diet. Basically, if you made a list of all the things that you enjoy eating or drinking, it's not a - you can't do those things.

GR:You should do your recovery in a Tibetan monastery.

JM: Right. It's that - I mean, doctors have said: You just live like a monk. Because I've done it once before, you know?

GR:Yeah, you've had this surgery before.

JM: We did the whole thing. And it's - you know, I say it's sort of like doing a cross-country trip from New York to L.A., getting to L.A. and realizing you forgot something in New York and getting back in the car and driving to go get it, you know? You may want to spend a couple of months in Los Angeles.

GR: I'm sorry to be laughing about this because it sounds miserable.

JM:No, it's - well, it's not - the problem is if I were to decide it were miserable, then my sentence would be being miserable for the next eighth months. So what I have to do as an artist and as a person - but I think I have the ability as an artist - is to just sort of repurpose this so that it's not purgatory.

GR: How does this sort of affect you when you, say - I mean, when you were recording this record, "Born and Raised," I mean, did you suspect anything while you were in the studio? Did you just sort of suddenly think: Something's wrong.

JM:Oh, yeah. No, I knew it was wrong because I'd gone to a doctor back in April and saw this thing on the scope.

PD: What made you want to make the Montana gig be your return to the stage after two years?

JM: I was just going to play guitar. It was going to be me sort of curating the night and playing guitar in everybody’s band. And it just turned out that I had been given the clean bill of health about a month ago. I didn’t really believe it. I actually had them go back another time to look again, and I kind of feel like I want to go back a third time, because I’m just not used to it going my way. It’s funny – you can’t even call it a granuloma anymore. It’s called a retinoid, which is where the granuloma was. It’s gone. After being plagued by it for two years, you almost keep thinking it’s like the end of Nightmare on Elm Street. There’s always this moment that it’s gonna come back, and I’m learning that that’s my imagination.

PD: Is it possible the granuloma could come back?

JM: Sure. Everybody goes through this – at 35, you realize you just can’t do whatever you want to do in terms of diet, sleep and overuse. You’re held accountable. It’s a ratio of one to one of what you put in to what you get out. I never went off the rails, but as a singer you have to really watch what you put into your body. Especially with what you put in your body before you lay flat and go to sleep. You don’t realize that when you go out and have a couple drinks and you come back home and you pass out, you’re raiding your esophagus with acid from two or three whiskey sours. If you do that night after night and then you sing eight hours a day while you’re writing a record, you’re going to start wearing away at the stuff in your throat.

PD: After the surgeries, how has your voice changed?

JM: Everything changed about my voice. I don’t have the projection. My laugh changed. The way I used to laugh is kind of like that “I’m embarrassed,” high-pitched laugh. I don’t really laugh that way anymore. I’ve found new ways around everything – new ways to talk, new ways to laugh. Now I wonder if I can go right back to the shape of my voice that I had when I was singing once I can do what I want to do with it.

[Narration]: Mason went with Mayer on a visit to Dr. Gwen Korovin, who asked Mayer to try a little scale. The picture was encouraging. "That looks better for sure," she said.

The growth, now barely noticeable, has almost healed.

Mason asked what the botox actually did. "The botox actually doesn't allow the vocal folds to meet," Dr. Korovin said. "It paralyzes the muscles so that by paralyzing the muscles you cannot bring the vocal folds together. That allows them to rest so the area isn't banging into each other."

Ironically, Mayer lost his singing voice after he put his foot in his mouth, in two widely-quoted interviews.

Surgery removed the growth, but it came back. And when we met up with Mayer in October in New York, he had just had a botox injection.

JM: Through the neck, which was fascinating. It's a small enough needle that you don't go totally berserk when you see it.

[Narration]: The treatments meant Mayer could not sing, and he had to cancel the tour behind his new album.

JM: I'm first of all, like, emotionally super-fragile in this period of time, because I don't have a job, you know?

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.

Because of the surgery, you couldn't sing or even speak for months. What was that like?

It was exciting at first. And then the novelty wears off, and that's when what could have been depression sets in. And I think you have a choice in those moments in life. You can panic, or you can go, Well, this is f---ing interesting.

Why didn't you panic?

Because I knew that wasn't an option. You've signed up for a wild life anyway. It's no less wild to lose the ability to sing than it is to put your first record out.

Has your voice changed?

It's coming back, and it will come back all the way. The Botox takes a while to dissolve, so as it dissolves, my range comes back.

How did that affect your recent album, Born and Raised and your new one, Paradise Valley?

They stem from this inability to sing higher. I didn't know I had a granuloma for most of the making of Born and Raised. The songs are all low [in pitch] because I would hit a ceiling faster. Looking back on it now, I've been making these records based on those limitations.

Interviewer: On that note, and I was speaking to Michael about this earlier, I know that you had some throat surgery not too long ago and that was difficult and obviously you're speaking perfectly fine today. [Do] you want to talk a little bit about that? I know you've had to do some botoxy stuff.

JM: "Botoxy." I had botulism inserted into my neck by way of a hypodermic syringe.

Interviewer: That's, um, unfortunate.

JM: It worked. Immediately it worked. The one thing I learned was that medicine the world of medicine doesn't know everything. It's not a complete map. Not every single area of that globe has been charted. And you don't know that til you hit something and you go "oh we don't have any idea where we are right now." You know when a doctor tells you—I remember the first guy I really talked on the phone about it he went "oh boy." When the doctor goes "yeah you got one kid. This is a tough." And then when doctors give you like nine options and each option kind of cancels out the next one and the one before it.

You get to that like, what would you do if you were me thing. And really all it was was just this abrasion in my throat. Because of where it was my throat kept working working, singing singing, talking talking. It wouldn't heal. It was like having a cut on your hand they said, and just not stop clapping. So the first thing was with an operation that tried to cut it out hoping that the healing would be easier. I don't know. Then I met a guy who said here's what we do we shoot you up with Botox, it paralyzes the vocal cords so you can't clear your throat, you can't close them even if you tried. And I said great, when does that happen? And he says right now. 

At that moment it was like I really thought about athletes. Athletes, they work at the highest level of physicality that a human being can have. So in a way these two little muscles right here sort of like being a basketball player, or football player. Your football. 

I know my audience.

[Laughter]

[Interview]: Good save.

JM: Thank you. Actually I was thinking Arsenal, when I said I only know one team it's Arsenal. Where if you're performing at this high-level, and what I mean by high level I mean sort of these large stages where there's there's crowds of 25,000 people each night I thought immediately in that office thought about athletes and athletes sort of hand their body over to the team. Yeah cut the knee out, whatever you like, take the cartilage out, whatever you need I'll be back in two years. I thought about Peyton Manning who had a neck issue and wasn't on the field for a while, thought about Kobe Bryant who continually has problems with his fingers. You know, Dwyane Wade or Chris Bosh's knee or something like that. Your body is sort of now handed over to this sort of Olympian level thing that you do. So if something happens to it you don't really necessarily have a say or even have a self that embodies that.

So I was like yeah, we got to do it. And so they actually injected it through the neck from the outside. He feels around and then he goes and pushes it through—you feel the needle go through the neck, through your throat [makes noise] and then again he's like "okay that's that side".

[Laughter]

And in those moments you stare at whatever the dumb picture on the doctor's office wall is or you stare at some arbitrary thing and it becomes sort of, you have this bond with it because you're staring at. And this is what you have to say to yourself: I love music. I love singing. I love doing this. I'll see you later, I'll do it again, we'll be back. I love this too much. And it's no different than getting that slip from Berklee going like this, I love music. They're leaps of faith because you want to do what you love and you have no other choice but to move forward because backwards is screwed. You just burnt backwards down. There's no backwards anymore.

And then in a way sometimes I think we do that so we don't leave ourselves an option, there's no debate. It's this way because there's nothing back there, there's all F you back there. So I never really freaked out. I had a difficult time but I knew I love music, I love singing, I love being an artist. And I'm also in some odd way somewhere in the middle of my own biography that will say "and then in 2011 he had this," and if you sort of commit to the extremes that I do in my life, I realized very early on that I was going to commit to extremes. Then one of the extremes as well as getting a Grammy on your second year of playing on stage is also going to be having an ailment that's going to take you out of the game for a minute and it's when you realize that, oh okay so there's sort of this balance that's happening overall and it's it's not happening here it's happening all the way to the left and all the way to the right there you go that's a crazy way to live you know but I'm sort of signed up for the ride now present company and experience included here because this is really out of my element.

AS: You were recovering from a throat injury, and you sound great today.

JM: Thank you. It's coming back very slowly. It's a lesson in patience because, you know, singing is supposed to be this sort of effortless sort of soaring. It's still a little bit like, you know, flying a helicopter with your feet in your hands, but I'm getting there. And it's sort of - every month gets a little bit easier, yeah.

AS: Do you physically sing differently now from how you did before the injury?

JM: It's a little bit boxier because, you know - well, I have to sort of back up. The treatment for this final round - the thing that worked, because I'd had a surgery, I'd had voice rest. With a stroke of good luck, I met another doctor who said, we inject Botox into your throat, and that will paralyze your vocal cords so that it gives this thing on your vocal cords time to heal. But what it does is, it renders you completely silent.

AS: So you couldn't even whisper to friends.

JM: I could whisper, but that was it. (Whispering) This time last year, I probably sounded like this. And if I laughed, I'd have to go, ha, ha, ha. What I found very interesting was that I didn't enjoy playing guitar, just playing songs.

AS: Just without singing.

JM: I didn't like it. Which, for years, I said, I'm a guitar player. I'm a guitar player. And I did a lot of sit-ins with people. I sat in with the Stones. I sat in with Zac Brown Band. I sat in with a lot of people. And I missed that microphone, man. I missed that microphone.

JM: No, I had a granuloma, which is worse. It's a benign thing that is a terror on somebody because where it grows is where your vocal cords hit. And there's acid reflux coming up from the bottom, and there's vocal cords hitting. And this flesh doesn't get a chance to heal.

DD: Oh, shit. 

JM: It's this almost like a feedback loop of flesh that keeps building up and then your vocal cords won't close. Oddly enough my vocal cords were fine it was that they wouldn't close because this granulated tissue would just keep growing. And the first thing I had done to it was I had it removed— which creates a scar that I’ll always have and I'll always deal with—

DD: Who did it? Like Sugarman or somebody? 

JM: No, it was a guy on the East Coast. A real, real sharpshooter. But he didn't get it done right. He did it right but it didn't take because it's such a tricky thing to have. You ever tell the doctor everything and they go, “oh boy?" I have a granuloma, “oh boy.” They'll all tell you it's from three or four different causes, very difficult to pinpoint the cause—so I was in it.

I just felt like a basketball player who had to get his knee fixed. Whatever it takes. They put things up my nose down, my throat. I wore a monitor that went up my nose and down my sinuses and down my throat for a day. And when I swallowed food it pulled my sinuses. It was like, it was disgusting. But I did it because I want to sing again.

JM: I am a monk to keep it this way. My voice needs 12 hours of voice rest, no drinking, no acid reflux, sleeping on a wedge pillow. This is why I love music because I got one bullet left in the gun. 

DD: Whoa.

JM: And you better aim every time.
 
DD: And you haven't had any problem since that botox? 
 
JM: I have moments where I have to back up. Like, nothing's been as—I don't think it'll ever get as bad as it was because I monitor it—but I get sore from singing. My vocal cords get swollen and when my vocal cords get swollen, there's always some stuff down there that's not perfectly symmetrical because of what's happened, but that's life. One of your knees is always gonna be a little—

DD: My neck right now I got a herniated disk, dude

JM: So I have a voice that I'm out of extra chances with. And there's a beautiful spirit to that which is I don't have any room left to look at this thing as anything other than a gift. I'm out of lives. I had nine lives, I got one left. And that means we go back to our hotel room and we're silent for at least 12 hours. 

DD: Wow. 

JM: We sleep on a wedge pillow. I travel—nobody knows this, and you're gonna be into this. You're the right guy to talk about this. I travel with my own scope. I scope myself. I travel with a medical vocal scope. 

DD: So you put something down—

JM: Down my own throat. 

DD: And you can look at it?

JM: I take my own pictures and I text it to my doctor. 

DD: Really?! 

JM: I never have to go to an ENT again. 

DD: Wow. 

JM: So I was in Amsterdam and my voice was feeling sore and I took a look at it and I went—and I know how to look at it now cause I know what to look for. I know everything about my condition. Again, the curious mind Googling—What are retinoids? What is abducted? What is adducted? What is a granuloma? What is epithelium?” 

DD: Holy shit!

JM: So I can look at it and actually kind of go “this looks a little worse, I see well acid reflux let me send this off to my doctor.” And then I also travel with a pharmacy so that he can prescribe me something and I already have it. 

DD: Wow. 

JM: So I got a drawer on the road—I think every singer should have this. 

DD: Absolutely.

JM: You should build a relationship with your doctor where he trusts that you're not an animal, and he trusts you to take care of yourself on the road. ENT’s, I think more than any other doctor, are the hardest to find a great one. Cause it’s very difficult to understand the life of a singer. So I have a great one in UCLA and no matter where I am I traveled with a Pelican case that has a scope in it—I set up the scope same, I swab it down, plug in the fiber-optic light, start a new file for myself scope myself and I go, “It's not as bad as I thought," and I send it off to my doctor. I would take this and that and that, and I have this and that and that, so it really is remote medicine.