Call Him Captain Backfire

The Rejection and Reclamation of John Mayer

John Mayer performing live in 2019 by Christian Sarkine

My brother first introduced me to John Mayer’s hit song, “Daughters,” in our parents’ ugly green Chevy Astro. At seven years old, after Luong put Heavier Things into the CD player, I listened to one of the best guitarists ever to grace the stage just before he skyrocketed into fame. Today, Mayer is known for his riffs in the background of Khalid’s songs or accompanying Lizzy McAlpine and Jacob Collier in a skilled duet, as much as for fronting revival jam band Dead & Company. I knew John Mayer back when he was a nobody, for better or for worse, his scratchy voice burned onto a CD using Limewire. In those days, my siblings and I deemed Mayer’s music worthy of the trouble we got into when we occupied the phone line with the screeching dial-up tone. We forced our friends to listen to our new favorite songs, each a new and rare treasure, on the way to school, in the bleachers between class, and—my favorite—daydreaming, before bed, about the lives we had yet to live.

“Daughters” earned Mayer two Grammys, and his first two releases, Room for Squares and Heavier Things were widely recognized and, eventually, folded into the collective consciousness. I listened to these albums relentlessly, wondering if the argument about winter romance was accurate in “St. Patrick’s Day,” if I would ever have the “City Love” Mayer sang about. Before I ever fell in love, I had the sense that Mayer knew about the pitfalls of vulnerability and boldly chose to wear his heart on his sleeve. Back then, I had no notion of privilege, nor the immunity granted to a tall white man from Connecticut. It came as no surprise, then, that I fell for a musician from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, with as big a love for John Mayer as mine, the moment I stepped onto my college campus, fresh out of the car where I had blasted “Why Georgia” on repeat during the drive up I-75.

For me, no artist more meaningfully marks the triumphs and pitfalls of young romance than

Mayer, whose earnest lyrics can make the most open-hearted person cringe. There is no denying that even in his emotional immaturity, he tapped into the human experience of heartbreak with an incisive level of clarity, even as a twentysomething—and not just his conquests as a bad boy, but his failures, too. A romantic from birth, I saw myself in Mayer’s restless gaze, a half-ugly boyishness that made him stick out like a sore thumb in photos of other celebrities—particularly those he ended up dating during his storied career.

Once, when my college boyfriend’s family came to visit before his graduation, his brother sat with me in my best friend’s dorm room and played “I Don’t Trust Myself (With Loving You)” on an acoustic guitar. That day, I was upset with both brothers—it seemed I was constantly competing for more time with a love I knew would end the moment my boyfriend walked across the stage and collected his diploma. There, in a dorm room with his only sibling, I was confronted with the complexity of loving someone but knowing you are wrong for them—a song perhaps inspired by Mayer’s short love affair with Jennifer Aniston, with whom he saw no future. And I watched my young love reflect the impossibility of their relationship: intense and inevitable, a chapter to be forgotten in ten years’ time.

Mayer’s ability to describe futile-feeling romance earned my admiration, which peaked during my undergraduate years. In 2017, the middle of my senior year, I was amazed when he finally returned to the scene with four songs that reminded me of his glory days, back when he let the guitar in his hands take the lead. I’m embarrassed to admit that this love is what remains of my relationship with John Mayer, fraught as it was, especially given an uproar surrounding perceived racist, sexist, and homophobic rhetoric he spewed in a notorious 2010 Playboy interview.

Before that point, Mayer was already a suspicious character. In his own words, as he grew more and more out of touch, he started to “invent [his] own grenade,” or rather, his looseness with words (it seems that his 2001 release, “My Stupid Mouth,” prophesied his downfall). Earlier in 2010, Mayer’s interview with Rolling Stone included multiple references to his masturbation habits and obsession with attention. Worst of all, he said he was looking to date a woman with “a beautiful vagina.”

Later that year, in the infamous Playboy interview, Mayer singlehandedly destroyed what remained of his reputation and the grace his fanbase gave him, a seemingly limitless resource. As if competing with himself in the Stupid Mouth Olympics, he called Jessica Simpson “sexual napalm.” Then he talked about having a “hood pass” and used the n-word multiple times casually. He threw in a slur for gay people. His grand finale? Comparing his appendage to David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Throughout the years, I’ve heard the details of this interview in pieces. Seen as a singular mishap, the interview might have passed me by. But seen within the context of his reliance on blues to produce his music, or his tentative start in the heart of the South, it was unacceptable. It felt to me that he had leaned on the contributions of Black guitarists and jazz musicians to produce his sound. And this interview reminded me that Mayer was not just mortal, but, in so many cases, irredeemable. When I listened to his music after that, it was with a flash of shame, or with my siblings, who shared the same level of forgiveness that I did, if for no other reason, to enjoy the songs that had decorated our shared childhood.

Mayer seemed to get the hint from his fans. He disappeared into Montana’s sprawling ranches, or at least a Montana aesthetic, and released Born and Raised and Paradise Valley in quick succession between 2012 and 2013. Stripped of his previous sexuality, the vulnerability of Battle Studies, he was no longer a guitar whisperer, but a grown man sharing dispatches from Neverneverland. And I thought, sadly, we may never get him, or what I really wanted—the idea of him—back. I missed the boy with a self-deprecating sense of humor, the one who could mess up as badly as the rest of us, sing about it, then make the guitar sing, too.

In late 2014, Mayer got to work on The Search for Everything, an album with Easter eggs about Katy Perry, who had remained by his side from 2012 until their final goodbye, which didn’t happen until 2015. My assumption was that Perry must have loved him, despite the on-and-off again relationship coming to an inevitable end. When the world could no longer stand John Mayer, she remained romantically and musically linked to him. By the time they broke up, Mayer was once more a star. I listened to the four songs he released about her for the first time in 2017, Wave One, in the middle of that last year of college and felt, suddenly, that I finally had Mayer’s true sound back after a four-year hiatus.

Take, for example the slow burn of “Edge of Desire,” the song that describes, with a deep yet fluid sense of tragedy, the feeling of yearning for a relationship one tries to resuscitate to no avail. “I want you so bad, I’ll go back on the things I believe,” Mayer croons. “There, I just said it: I’m scared you’ll forget about me.” In his desperation, he admits his willingness to sacrifice it all for just a moment more with the one he loves. “Maybe this mattress will spin on its axis and find me on yours” used to be the line I repeated in the car, reeling back the song on repeat for that one sweet moment of feeling so seen, so understood, an untethered romantic pitched forward at 80 miles per hour on the highway. But the most astonishing part of this song is the bridge, when he matches the depth and complexity of his surrender to this love affair to the notes that linger, the riffs that swell and crescendo like the wave of emotions he would later describe in The Search for Everything. The fact that I can recognize Mayer’s sound as a featured guest on a Zach Bryan song, for example, confirms that he has created a unique stamp, a singular style, especially now—if not through lyrical mastery, then through the emotive nature of his riffs.

Forgiveness is a long road. I tried in earnest to balance my anger toward Mayer with the music I loved and craved. His frivolous interview hurt me and countless fans, who relied on him to preserve a half-decent image so we could simply enjoy his art. Then, during my sophomore year, nursing a broken heart that would take another half-decade to heal, I was floored by the energy of “Moving On and Getting Over.” I lost myself in the song’s layers, car dancing to the groove as I took my Honda Accord on Tennessee backroads, for once forgetting the call of depression and suicide that marked my college years.

John Mayer performing live at HP Pavilion in San Jose, California, June 5, 2007, by Eric Chan. The concert was part of the Continuum Tour.

I remember where I sat when I first saw the 2017 New York Times profile that put Mayer back on the map. I was on an airplane when I read the words of a repentant Mayer, fresh out of what he called “the lean years.” Not only did he acknowledge the Playboy interview directly, but he made it clear his desire to infuse his work with sensitivity going forward. Still, I was suspicious. As evidence of his attempts to avoid so-called cultural appropriation, he pointed to the music video for “Still Feel Like Your Man,” a song written to honor Katy Perry, who later announced her engagement to Orlando Bloom. Yet the video is absurd: in it, Mayer dances between two people in giant panda costumes. Bonsai and bamboo surround him as they perform for a past lover’s attention, or possibly the owner of what Mayer calls a “disco dojo.” In his hands, this dojo owner holds a case containing a butterfly—perhaps symbolizing Perry—that Mayer releases at the end. In the YouTube comments, one user, @patriztandoc5252 expresses exactly how I feel: “Even after his dancing......I still feel like his fan.” It’s hard to imagine how the video had professional dancers, much less a trustworthy appropriation consultant. Yet there I was, feeling a strange thrill that perhaps I could listen to John Mayer once more without the shame that followed me into every album, every song. After reading the Times interview, I felt that Mayer’s own shame finally matched mine. I wanted to remain a fan, and listen to his music without apologizing for it, but I needed his repentance. Now, it seemed, I had it.

In March 2023, I finally saw him live. My boyfriend at the time, despite not sharing many of my interests, indulged my most embarrassing ones—especially my obsession with John Mayer’s music. Joel was seven years older than me and remembered the rise of this guitar legend. And, like many people, he enjoyed “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room,” the moody song that outlines the struggle of remaining in an increasingly toxic, emotionally charged relationship. That night, we arrived at Atlanta’s largest venue, State Farm Arena. I was always stressed about work in those days, so that night, I had little energy to dress up. Maybe I knew that no one would be looking at me. Mayer, who had lived in Atlanta for some of his career’s most significant years, had returned to a city that shaped him and his sound, and the crowd rippled with excitement.

Joy Oladokun opened for him that night, and I was spellbound. As she sang “Sunday,” a heart-wrenching song about coming out in a family with religious roots, I couldn’t help but wonder if Mayer put her front and center as some strange form of reparations for his previous words. In the world of identity politics, it seemed almost like a cheap shot, except in addition to being Black and gay, Oladokun proved to be genuinely talented and deserving of a spotlight. I had followed her music since the beginning, too, but never imagined I would see the two on the same stage. In the way I had done so often before, I half-forgave Mayer for his proximity to her. And in a way, I trusted that if Oladokun could forgive him, I could get all the way there.

It shames me to say, then, that seeing the young John Mayer projected onto a screen made my heart flutter. Before he stepped onto the stage, we all watched a video in which a young Mayer spoke tentatively about his future. “Maybe you should come along for the next… however long this will be.” [1] he says about his burgeoning career. Then, the 2023 version of Mayer steps onto the stage, and the crowd goes wild. Wielding his guitar, he walked us through every chapter, every moment of his love stories, his meditations on mortality. Most of all, he let the guitar speak for itself. Yes, I loved this man, I loved his ability to make an instrument sing with tears. But my connection to his lyrics were so internal, so personal, I found myself growing angry at my boyfriend standing next to me, who nodded along politely, and had no idea how deep this well of emotions ran. Even after his controversies, for some reason, I cannot shake the visceral reaction I have to Mayer’s unmatched guitar solos, the way he gets lost in his practice. He is one of those artists who was, simply, born for something, and that thing was music.

And Mayer still seems supplicating about his past mistakes. Before his relationship with Perry, Mayer dated Taylor Swift, 19, while he was 32. I was a big fan of both and too young to fully wrap my head around the implications of this 12-year age gap. Her fan base, the Swifties, though, have not forgotten. Mayer’s most recently acknowledgement of their criticisms said: “You’re berating me and I’m hearing you out" on a social media clip. I’ve also seen a video of Mayer in 2010, when he says, “In the quest to be clever, I completely forgot about the people that I love and the people that love me.” No acknowledgement would have leveled Mayer’s career 15 years ago. But he managed to rise back up, riding on the self-deprecating reputation he built in the early 2000s, and I must admit that I buy it.

In May 2023, I volunteered at a tabling event just to see him play again. I couldn’t afford tickets to Dead & Company on my own, but I worked a voting registration booth and found myself turned loose afterward, into a crowd of Deadheads smoking joints and blowing the smoke into a temperate Atlanta night. During a Georgia spring, if you hold your hand out in the car, you feel the velvet softness of the night air. The balance of humidity and coolness, even as I stood still, made me smile. Then, John Mayer graced the stage. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but he was no longer a mystery, no longer a Goliath. He was a man doing what he loved most—making music—with others who rarely looked up except to connect briefly with the crowd before laying back into a jam. When I left that night, I felt as if Mayer had not been there at all. He had evolved into something beyond pop star or problematic bachelor. He was now part of the tapestry of music and music history.

The last time I saw my brother, I found myself thanking him for introducing me to John Mayer. The man has been with me through thick and thin, through all my love stories. Luong and I sat on the front porch of my parents’ house, where he still lives. Remnants of the night before—cigarettes and bottles of Corona—littered the glass-topped patio table. “I love him, even though he’s problematic nowadays,” I added with my usual embarrassment.

“Really?” Luong asked, genuinely confused.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “He once called his penis a white supremacist.”

“He said that?” Luong asked, eyes wide. “What the fuck?”

“I know,” I nodded. We sat silently for a beat.

“That’s fucked up,” he said finally, blowing thick smoke from a lit cigarette. “But damn, can he play.”

“That he can,” I nodded. “Like no one else.”

John Mayer performing live at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Georgia on March 17, 2010, by Christina [sic.] The concert was part of the Battle Studies World Tour.