Spiritual Enlightenment through Music

Home | Financial Post | News | Opinion | Arts | Life | Sports | Homes | Cars | Blogs | Multimedia | Classifieds


Main | About | Contact Editor | Subscribe RSS

The Quotable John Mayer
Posted: February 11, 2010, 1:50 PM by Mark Medley
Music, john mayer


In light of recent events, it’s somewhat ironic that John Mayer’s debut album includes a song called My Stupid Mouth.


“My stupid mouth has got me in trouble, I said too much again,” he sings.


Nine years later, his stupid mouth is still getting the popular musician in trouble. Egotistical, brash, and willing to say just about anything, the singer-songwriter’s off-colour quotes and frank answers in interviews are a journalist’s dream. But if the backlash to a recent interview with Playboy is any indication, Mayer may want to take an oath of silence.


The 32-year-old singer-songwriter behind the hits Your Body Is A Wonderland and Daughters shared too much information with the men’s magazine, comparing his penis to a white supremacist, openly discussing his masturbation habits, and describing his ex-girlfriend Jessica Simpson as “sexual napalm” and “crack cocaine.”


Mayer apologized for his comments on Wednesday, both on Twitter and later that night at a concert in Nashville.


“I think it’s time to stop trying to be so raw in interviews,” he said on Twitter. “It started as an attempt to not let the waves of criticism get to me, but it’s gotten out of hand and I’ve created somewhat of a monster. I wanted to be a blues guitar player. And a singer. And a songwriter. Not a shock jock. I don’t have the stomach for it.”


His voice breaking, he told the crowd at the concert that “in the quest to be clever I completely forgot about the people that I love and the people that loved me.”

It’s hardly the first time Mayer has run his mouth. Herewith are some of Mayer’s greatest, er, hits:


• In a May 2001 profile in which Mayer was described as “the antithesis of your everyday average wannabe pop/rock star,” a not-quite-famous Mayer recalled “When I first started playing out, my audience consisted of drunk schoolteachers who would tell me how much I reminded them of their son and then they’d grab my ass.”


• In a 2003 Rolling Story interview Mayer admitted “I wrote a fan letter to Michael J. Fox when I was eleven, asking how I could get my hair like his ... Around the time of Secret of My Success, he had a little mullet, with a tuft thing behind his ear. I tried to get that going, but my hair is too thick.”


• In a 2003 interview with a hometown newspaper, he said “A lot of people think I’m cocky, and I think cocky can be cute. Being arrogant is totally different. I’ve learned that now. If cocky is when, before someone throws you a pitch, you think you’re gonna hit it, then yeah, I’m cocky. Arrogance is talking about it in the dugout all day.”


• In 2005 he told MTV that for “my next record, I’m closing up shop on acoustic sensitive and I’m gonna go to electric guitar and make something else happen ... I’m bored, man, [singing,] ‘I miss your kiss so much.’ Truth is, I don’t.”


• During an impromptu stand-up comedy routine in May 2006, Mayer joked that he never consummated his brief relationship with actress Jennifer Love Hewitt, blaming food poisoning. He later apologized to Hewitt, telling Us Weekly that “it really was me making fun of myself.”


• In another interview with Rolling Stone that same year Mayer said “I bought myself a Playgirl once ... I just loved the feeling that there was a porno you really, really weren’t supposed to have ... If there’s some shit I’m not supposed to have that’s on the top rack, with the black bar over the bag, I want to know what’s in there. I don’t care what it is — furniture, spider monkeys.”


• From the same interview: “Everybody right now in the world of entertainment is a pussy. A pussy ... They’re all so sensitive. What the *** happened?”


• Still in the same interview, Mayer was sort-of clairvoyant: “I’m at a point right now where the more I talk, the more I’m going to say something in the next twelve months that’s going to damage my career.”


• In August 2008, he held a press conference to explain why he broke up with Jennifer Aniston: “I ended a relationship to be alone because I don’t want to waste somebody’s time if something’s not right.”


• In March 2009, the singer told E! that Twitter was “inherently silly and it’s inherently dumb...If you really think that Twitter is the pathway to spiritual enlightenment, well...It’s one step away from sending pictures of your poop.” Mayer now has over 3 million followers on the social networking site.


• Last June, after the dust-up between Perez Hilton and the Black Eyed Peas in Toronto, Mayer tweeted: “Last year P!nk kneed me in the nuts outside Chateau Marmont. I was pissing blood for days. Did I make a scene?”


• Last year he told Details that “sometimes I feel like I do two things for a living. I make records and I talk to people. The record is much, much better than any interview I can give — you’ll walk away from the record liking me a hell of a lot more than you would walking away from an interview.”

• He told The New York Times last fall that “I should be having sex with more girls” and that “it’s crazy to me that in my head, that being 32 and dating women is going to get me in trouble ... I can’t even explain to you how terrible that feels, that I equate dating a woman with punishment, shame, guilt, disappointment, reproach, reprimand, persecution. It’s a nightmare.”

• In a Rolling Stone cover story last fall, Mayer admitted that “I almost didn’t do this interview because I’ve gone through so much discomfort on a profound level in speaking my mind and telling the truth and being taken advantage of by the truth. I was feeling preyed upon by people who wanted to know what I had to say about things. I had stopped doing press, I canceled my U.K. trip, I canceled any Canada press, and my manager said, ‘Does that mean that even if we get a Rolling Stone cover, you wouldn’t do it?’ I said, ‘That’s correct, I wouldn’t do it.’ Then I decided, ‘Let’s do this one more time,’ but after this, I have nothing else to say. There is nothing more subterranean than this, so I think I’m ready to be done and just play music.”

“So maybe I try too hard,” he sings on the aforementioned track, “but it’s all because of this desire: I just wanna be liked. I just wanna be funny. Looks like the joke’s on me.”

• John Mayer performs at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto on Sunday.


[John Mayer at the 51st Annual Grammy Awards. Photo by Lucy Nichilson/Reuters]



Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/theampersand/archive/2010/02/11/the-quotable-john-mayer.aspx#ixzz0fHeiL2kr
The National Post is now on Facebook. Join our fan community today.