“Your Body Is A Wonderland” came out way back in 2001, and baby-faced crooner John Mayer has been through some shit since then. He dated a bunch of famous women, he released some follow-up albums that people didn’t really care about, and he gave a pair of interviews with Rolling Stone and Playboy that made him look like an asshole (one involved him casually dropping the n-word and lamenting the fact that he has a “David Duke cock”), but now he’s ready to own up to his past mistakes and start making hit songs again.
That’s according to an extensive New York Times piece, in which Mayer says he’s now old enough to be able to look back on his life and recognize what would be “the photonegative shot in Behind The Music,” which is to say that he knows he went off the rails for a while. He even notes that his two most recent albums, Born And Raised and Paradise Valley, were too boring and too far from the “Your Body Is A Wonderland” Mayer that everybody was super into all those years ago.
So he did some deep soul-searching and began to recognize that he’s a “young guy” who wants girls to like him, so he should go back to making music that will make people like him—and also that he should stop doing interviews where he sounds like a racist. It’s a roundabout way to come to the realization that he should be more self-aware, but it does seem like Mayer is in a better place now. If it results in him putting out another hit song, then that’s all for the better.
John Mayer’s newest album, The Search For Everything, came out earlier this year.