From now on, I’m going to refer to John Mayer as the king douche of TMI. Sexual napalm, crazy in bed? C’mon, you all know what I’m talking about. Anyhow, you wanted the John Mayer Playboy interview text? You’ve got it, bitches…after the jump.
PLAYBOY: Is this the last John Mayer interview?
JOHN MAYER: No, though I have fantasies of it. And that doesn’t come out of pretension or laziness. It’s difficult for me to explain my life to someone without sounding like I’m complaining, which I’m not. I have no problem saying I’m in a bit of a strange time in my life.
PLAYBOY: What’s strange about this time in your life?
JOHN MAYER: In one way or another, people probably know my name now. I’m squarely nestled in the crosshairs of their criticism and media reproach. I originally played music because I was an underdog, because I didn’t want to be in school, and it always had this quality of an uprising. When you first start out, you want people to know you. There is a quality of the unknown that is very sexy—like thinking, There might be a girl in this crowd who will have a conversation with me because she knows my music. For me, it has never been about fucking lots of girls. I could have fucked a lot more girls in my life if I hadn’t been trying so hard to get them to like me. If I have a conversation with a really hot girl that lasts all night and she says, “Wow, I had no idea I was going to like you this much,” that is the equivalent,for me, of getting laid.
PLAYBOY: So how has that changed?
JOHN MAYER: I’m no longer playing music so I can walk into a party and talk to chicks, because people know who I am now. In fact, now I have a sort of negative connotation with that. [laughs] It’s a headache, you know?
PLAYBOY: Meeting girls is a headache? You have to explain that.
JOHN MAYER: I hate being the heartbreaker. Hate it. If I date somebody and it doesn’t work out, it’s another nightmare for me. I don’t like the way the odds are stacked. If I date nine more girls before I get married—which I think would be completely appropriate—that would be nine more spats of character assassination. I don’t equate sex with release, I equate it with tension. It’s given me a lot of pause. Somewhere in my brain it has probably really fucked me up.
PLAYBOY: But who cares if people assassinate your character?
JOHN MAYER: I do. I just do. I consider myself a good guy, with the best of intentions. Anybody who has been in a relationship with me would stand by the fact that I’ve never been callous. I’ve never been a bad boy. I may have taken someone through the wringer psychologically, but I’ve never been sinister.
PLAYBOY: So you’ve lost the motivation of playing music to meet girls.
JOHN MAYER: If I was playing it so I could meet hot chicks, I’ve met hot chicks, quote unquote. If I was playing it to make a ton of money, I’ve made a ton of money. If I was playing it to be well-known, I am well-known. Once you put aside girls and money, it forces you to realign your motivation for being a musician. Now I’m not a have-not but a have. Which is interesting, becausemusic has to come from a have-not sort of place. And there are many places where I have-not.
PLAYBOY: What motivates you now?
JOHN MAYER: My motivation is to prove people wrong, to confuse them. I enjoy the challenge—I must be addicted to the challenge. I’ve gone from being a musician to being a celebrity. And when people do that, their work usually suffers. There are tunes on Battle Studies that are more applicable to other people’s lives than anything I’ve ever written before. This whole time I’ve stayed vulnerable, stayed frustrated, stayed confused. This record is the trade-off to having sort of brutalized myself for a few years. So if people see that over the past couple of years I actually got a firmer grip on writing songs about the ups and downs of life, they might go, “How did he have the time to make a record? Was he writing ‘War ofMy Life’ in the middle of me thinking he was a douche bag? Did I ever actually know him? Maybe he’s a pretty solid guy.”
PLAYBOY: What if you were to google the phrase John Mayer is a douche bag?
JOHN MAYER: You’d get a lot of hits. It’s this whole perception thing about tabloids, where 85 percent of the stories are not true. If you align yourself to be exactly who you know you are and to have dignity, maybe through that distorted lens you look askew to everyone else. I’ve done away with feeling aloof and trying to seem suave and bulletproof. I’ve resigned myself to being slightly awkward and goofballish.
PLAYBOY: It seems as though you realize that celebrities who complain don’t generate much sympathy.
JOHN MAYER: I have never once said “I wish the press would leave me alone.” With Twitter, I can show my real voice. Here’s me thinking about stuff: “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could download food?” It has been importantfor me to keep communicating, even when magazines were calling me a rat and saying I was writing a book.
PLAYBOY: Who did that?
JOHN MAYER: Star magazine at one point said I was writing a tell-all book for $10 million. On Star’s cover it said what a rat! My entire life I’ve tried to be a nice guy. The best I ever felt was when friends’ parents would say, “John can come over any time. We love that kid.” When I date a girl and find out her friends approve of me, I love it. I love being liked! I’ve given microscopic dedication to doing the right thing, taking the high road, and all of a sudden Star magazine says, “He’s a rat.” I can’t tell you it didn’t give me that much more bloodlust to do what people thought I couldn’t do.
PLAYBOY: It sounds simple, but it’s not: Battle Studies is an album about love.
JOHN MAYER: Sure. It’s an album about love in this day and age, and at my age, 32.
PLAYBOY: What do you mean by “in this day and age”? There aren’t any references in the songs that would have been unclear 20 years ago.
JOHN MAYER: I’m a self-soother. The Internet, DVR, Netflix, Twitter—all these things are moments in time throughout your day when you’re able to soothe yourself. We have an autonomy of comfort and pleasure. By the way, pornography? It’s a new synaptic pathway. You wake up in the morning, open a thumbnail page, and it leads to a Pandora’s box of visuals. There have probably been days when I saw 300 vaginas before I got out of bed.
PLAYBOY: What’s your point about porn and relationships?
JOHN MAYER: Internet pornography has absolutely changed my generation’s expectations. How could you be constantly synthesizing an orgasm based on dozens of shots? You’re looking for the one photo out of 100 you swear is going to be the one you finish to, and you still don’t finish. Twenty seconds ago you thought that photo was the hottest thing you ever saw, but you throw it back and continue your shot hunt and continue to make yourself late for work. How does that not affect the psychology of having a relationship with somebody? It’s got to.
PLAYBOY: You seem very fond of pornography.
JOHN MAYER: When I watch porn, if it’s not hot enough, I’ll make up backstories in my mind. My biggest dream is to write pornography.
PLAYBOY: How did you become a self-soother?
JOHN MAYER: I grew up in my own head. As soon as I lose that control, once I have to deal with someone else’s desires, I cut and run. I’m pretty culpable about being hard to live with. I have had a good run of imagining things into reality. I’ve got a huge streak of successes based on my own inventions. If you tell me I’m wrong or that I’m overthinking something, well, overthinking has given me everythingin my career. I have a hard time not looking at anxiety disorder as being like an ATM. I can invent things really well. I mean, I have unbelievable orgasms alone. They’re always the best. They always end the way I want them to end. And I have such an ability to make believe, I can almost project something onto my wall, watch it and get off to it: sexually, musically, it doesn’t matter. When I meet somebody, I’m in a situation in which I can’t run it because another person is involved. That means letting someone else talk, not waiting for them to remind you of something interesting you had in mind.
PLAYBOY: Masturbation for you is as good as sex?
JOHN MAYER: Absolutely, because during sex, I’m just going to run a filmstrip. I’m still masturbating. That’s what you do when you’re 30, 31, 32. This is my problem now: Rather than meet somebody new, I would rather go home and replay the amazing experiences I’ve already had.
PLAYBOY: You’d rather jerk off to an ex-girlfriend than meet someone new?
JOHN MAYER: Yeah. What that explains is that I’m more comfortable in my imagination than I am in actual human discovery. The best days of my life are when I’ve dreamed about a sexual encounter with someone I’ve already been with. When that happens, I cannot lay off myself.
PLAYBOY: There are some angry, accusatory songs on the record, but there are also self-critical songs. It goes through all the changing moods you have on the worst night of your life.
JOHN MAYER: Yeah, Battle Studies is that feeling between 10 p.m. and two a.m. when you have this wild level of arousal and optimism. It’s about the things people do to each other during those hours. I have wasted four hours of my life refusing to masturbate and believing that somehow the phone would ring and I’d get a call from somebody I hadn’t talked to in years.
PLAYBOY: The phone will ring and your life will change?
JOHN MAYER: Yeah. It’s like looking for a fix. I’ll spend four hours not even putting anything into motion, just believing somehow it’s going to come my way.
PLAYBOY: You talked before about being an underdog. What were you like at 16?
JOHN MAYER: I wasn’t paying attention in school. I would come home and play guitar, playing for all the moments I had that day when I couldn’t feel alive. I visualized I was a superhero with an alter ego: “By day, a gawky, zitfaced 16-year-old boy.…” I would sleep with my guitar because I thought it would make me play better. I had a 100-disc CD player in the basement, and I would load it up with Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Kenny Burrell and Bill Evans and play CDs while I slept on the floor. Like somehow, by osmosis, the music was getting into me. It was the only way I could build enough armor to go back to school the next day.
PLAYBOY: How many hours a day were you playing?
JOHN MAYER: Three to four hours a day when I was in school, and in the summertime five to six hours a day. I wasn’t smoking cigarettes or drinking, and I wasn’t trying to hook up. I wasn’t going to parties. I remember being in my room when there was a party across town, sitting in my room and pretending I was at the party and playing for them. I remember saying to myself, If I have to sleep on a pool table every night on tour, I’ll do it. I always had that desire to be a rock star.
PLAYBOY: Were you one of those smart kids who hated school?
JOHN MAYER: I would act up and get sent to the dean’s office and talk to him as though I was an adult. “I’m not trying to upset anybody, sir. With all due respect to you and your staff, I’m just not supposed to be here. It’s quite difficult for me to sit in class, because I’m supposed to be a guitar player, sir.” I was very cocky. But from the outset, there was opposition. My parents were not the biggest fans, to put it diplomatically. I grew up saying, “You’ll see. I can’t explain it yet, but you’ll see.” Early in my career, when I was 19 or 20, I’d meet presidents of record companies and refused to give them my demos. I’d say, “We’ll see each other again sometime.”
PLAYBOY: That is really cocky.
JOHN MAYER: It was incredibly cocky. I was so tempered in opposition that when the opposition went away, I started to look like a total asshole. When my first record came out, I was still saying, “You’ll see. Check out what I did. Eat it.” It gave me this reputation for being really arrogant. I probably should have stood on top of a roof and yelled, “Fuck you!” That “I’ll show you” instinct is still alive and well. Now, instead of “We don’t think you can do it,” it’s “We think you’re a douche bag.”
PLAYBOY: Do you still have a chip on your shoulder?
JOHN MAYER: Yep. I have an extremely tall antenna that reaches high into the sky and brings in a lot of cool stuff but also a lot of unnecessary stuff. If I hadn’t had my upbringing, I would have probably been like, “Yeah, this is fun. Cool.” But right now I still have “See? See, motherfucker?”
PLAYBOY: You put in a lot of hours playing the guitar, but it also seems you were quick to pick up music theory, harmony, composition.
JOHN MAYER: I’m wired for it. I’m lucky I found a thing I was wired for, and I found it at 13. I’ve already won one of the biggest gambles of all time, which was to forgo an education so I could pursue a real all-or-none scenario. I look pretty fucking smart for having done that, though it doesn’t change the fact that it was crazy.
PLAYBOY: You have a level of self-consciousness that seems like it could be exhausting.
JOHN MAYER: Maybe that’s the douche bag part of it. Maybe I’m so meta-aware that it’s off-putting to people. But I’m old enough to know I need to change. I’m getting tired of the illusion of control. I think I’ve made my best record now, at my lowest point of confidence.
PLAYBOY: You wanted to become a rock star, and now that you are one, it’s ruined your confidence? That’s odd.
JOHN MAYER: Lately I’ve realized it’s okay to enjoy being a rock star. Like, it might actually be fun to wear sunglasses in the airport and sit in the first-class lounge as a fucking rock star who’s about to go on a world tour. I had related it to something so painful, so frustrating, so confusing, that it would give me a tension headache. Being a famous musician seemed to have brought misunderstanding and strife and a fist in the back of the head when I read something about myself. I wrote this line yesterday: “Someday soon these will just be things we used to do.” I’m sort of making a list of all the things I know I’m going to laugh at myself for taking so seriously.
PLAYBOY: So you can already imagine your future?
JOHN MAYER: This is going to sound odd, but sometimes I meet the 40-year-old me and say, “What do I do?” And 40-year-old me says, “Don’t do every scheduled interview. Go to the zoo instead. You’re going to be fine, you knucklehead. Stop overthinking what people say.” I’m trying to fold over time, to see it as a random-access hard disk where I can move to any point in time and change the way I see today.
Read the rest of the John Mayer Playboy Interview text here.
Source: Playboy
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