John Mayer. My all-time favorite male pop-rock vocalist period. His smooth huskiness voice and realness quality to his lyrics are what I’m drawn into about his music since the very beginning with his Room For Squares debut album. I use to listen to this song and album, Heavier Things, religiously to the point where it was Mayer season in my boarding school room for months. There’s one thing I applaud Mayer for is that he’s categorized in a generic genre of pop rock, but his music has always been pure genius and has been the top of the pack. He’s legendary for me and that explains his longevity. I mean, he won a Song of The Year Grammy for his song Daughters and won Pop Vocal Album for Continuum over Sir Paul McCartney and that’s something.
This song stays true to Mayer’s musical existence. It has this uplifting message and tone that you can play it any time, anywhere. The musical production also reminiscent a lot of what U2 has done with their sound, which is a simple pop rock universal appealing sound to every age group. This song could have been played on Top 40, Adult Contemporary, Rock and even country to a marginal extent. However, Mayer has his own tricks of subtly adding blues-rock to all his songs. With this reason there’s no wonder why John Mayer has create classics. The video itself was basic pop rock cliché 101, but maybe because the early 00’s all videos were crafted like this and today the video’s are more elaborate and theatric. But what I liked about it was that Mayer had this pure innocence and a sense of vulnerability even when he was already revolutionizing music to his own right. He had this friendly persona to him, which he fucking sadly became a self-loathing prick for the past few years trying to the bad boy talking about being a master of sex and bashing ex-girlfriends in tabloids. Sad. Sad when artists like him are eaten up by fame when he was on the road of being the next Bruce Springsteen.
What I would love to see Mayer do now is experiment with more sounds. I haven’t really seen him stepping out of his comfort zone with all the music he has released so far. Yes, he has done featuring on other artist in other genres, but his actual sound has been thoroughly the same. Maybe try a country twang to a song or a jazz Herbie Hancock fussed number or even inject some really mild electronic computerized sound, but still stay true to his own sound. There are many new artists emerging right now like Bruno Mars who’s taking Mayer’s place, which Mayer has to step up his game. Still, Mayer music catalogue so far remains supreme.
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