John Mayer singles poll

i don't even know what that means -- not to mention that my tastes in rock & pop are not really abnormal by ilm standards (except for maybe extreme blink 182 stannery)

heard "No Such Thing" in the mall yesterday, that is a good-ass song

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

http://cdn.20minutos.es/img2/recortes/2011/10/06/34013-944-550.jpg

glad "no such thing" won because if not that would've been stupid

fathers be good to your markers, markers will love like you do

i actually like "bigger than my body" a lot

this guy can really shred!

thought this revive was gonna be the album out next week with Frank Ocean and Katy Perry features and a Taylor Swift diss

wow that is a hideous sentence

he moved to some ranch in montana and listened to the dead 24/7.

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18mkzdvkkinc8jpg/original.jpg

makes sense, he's kind of the Ben Affleck of music

new album is boring even by his standards

i wish i was paying attention to apple when he was doing shit w/ jobs during keynotes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MRDDJjTwTw

wow, kanye IS the new steve jobs, he knows john mayer too

http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/761181fda92ac8f1225f7a1a29509c3d753cce2c.jpg

thread need more pictures of the modern day john mayer that gets to see katy perry naked

http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/ac1394dbdcca6a36cbf486633b129cd813095ac3/r=x404&c=534x401/local/-/media/USATODAY/USATODAY/2013/07/13/1373736450003-AP-People-John-Mayer-1307131332_4_3.jpg

http://www.billboard.com/files/styles/promo_650/public/media/john-mayer-press-2013-650-430.jpg

Craftsman, feh. I wouldn't sit in his chairs -- and he'd use that one as a sex metaphor.

Oh please.

Sob Rock. July 16. pic.twitter.com/Hhn2sO9KRY

— John Mayer (@JohnMayer) June 1, 2021

You want to play with yourself in a hotel room and cry, go right ahead.

is there an album cover he's directly aping or is it just a general 80s AOR look?

Are we sure it's not "SOB rock"?

gottem

i think im gonna have to like this album

i hate him
i hate him
i hate him
i hate him
i hate him
i hate him
i hate him
i hate him
i hate him

where is brad’s hot take that his consensus fourth or fifth best album is actually the best?

uh i try to have as few opinions on john mayer as possible but i feel like there's no way he's made a record better than continuum and iirc that's the fan favorite

My sister picked out some Taylor Swift songs for me to listen to and I told her I thought “Dear John” was very good, and she told me it’s about John Mayer, who is not Josh Groban.

i enjoyed a number of songs from heavier things (not including "daughters")

i think i've figured out which album cover this reminds me of

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41cN2xnb0oL.jpg

*grits teeth* didn't see the damn amazon logo

DON: I think it was my wife who alerted me to John Mayer's work years ago, back when "No Such Thing" was all over the radio and television. I've kept listening through the years, quietly admiring his career arc proving he's more than just a smart guy with a guitar--a struggle I'm all too familiar with.

GLENN: We truly were the Vasco de Gama and Cabeza de Vaca to his Kit Carson in exploring bodies as Wonderlands.

DON: Well, yeah.

It's got the tropes down:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66Ne5dVDfLM

(Don Was producing! Toto/Thriller guy on keebs!)

I…. don’t hate this?

it's pretty good. nice to see maren

Xpost lol was gonna say synths sound like "Africa".

Is this his Tunnel of Love?

It feels like a sibling of Miley’s Plastic Hearts, as far as mining a specific 80s sound that hasn’t been overdone already, and then aiming to write a standard that holds its own against the originals from that time.

feel like there may be songs like Genesis's "Throwing It All Away" here, surely he'll pull out the guitar more.

It was several days before I heard the "Africa" thing people were talking about, because my immediate impression was Steve Winwood. Not just the synth sound choices, but the progression, et al. I mean, I assume it's a hodgepodge of many different things, but Winwood stuck out to me most initially (and still does).

I heard Winwood too more than Toto. Smart of him to upload an acoustic version, just to show the bones underneath the arrangement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtDhSX_77fg

hornsby

kinda

I think I like everything about this except the outro with the female vocalist. It gets too corny at the end there. Also that add histrionic vocals for extra emotion in the last choris sounds more like a 90’s trick than an 80’s one to me.

Some interesting bits in this interview.

“Yeah, it was, ‘Pretend someone made a record in 1988 and shelved it and it was just found this year.’ I think if you’re wise enough and care enough about the thing you’re doing, you can go back to another time and reanimate it —you can go heat that mercury back up, and find a way not to reproduce something but continue to produce it from the original loom.”

Around 2011, the idea returns that being stingy with melody is what’s cool, and it was, because people had gone too extreme with being so melodic. Now we love asymmetrical song composition — as perfected by Frank Ocean. Post-’Pyramids,’ we go, ‘I could be melodic, but I choose not to. I’m not going to paint a face, I’m going to paint shapes.’ Then everyone spoofs that and you get people painting impressionistic shapes — and at a certain point, people go, ‘I really wanna see a face again!’ No offense to anyone doing triangles, but I wanna see humanity in the music, and for me, Sob Rock is this cautious return to how powerful it is to hear wide intervals played loudly on a synth.

Ge1r to thread

It's interesting to me how he's sort of reinvented himself as a guitar hero (blues rock, fronting Dead & Co., etc.). Like he is constantly mentioned in guitarist circles today. I guess deservedly so, not exactly my thing but he is a really good guitar player.

I guess it's partly interesting to me because the category of guitar hero is semi-dead, and to the extent it exists it's mostly people outside of the pop world.

I don't know, I think the "guitar guy" narrative has followed him for a lot longer than that, so I don't think it's a "reinvention" - more of a parallel thing to his pop star beginnings.

I mean, I really remember people telling me "but he's actually a killer guitar player" even before he started doing his trio records.

yeah like 15 years ago this dude played me Mayer covering Hendrix on some Live at Abby Road thing and I actually enjoyed it. Probably annoyed a few people with “actually John Mayer is a smokin guitar player” challops

I looked up his stats for the NJ thread, and, well, yeah he doesn't really qualify. Big debut, followed by several solid sellers albeit with ultimately diminishing #s, ala Pearl Jam.

It's not the same, but I do recall tons of copies of his Trio live album hitting used bins shortly after it came out.

Something I made and posted elsewhere on ILM

https://frinkiac.com/video/S04E05/ZcxmdX47EyOkm0rfXgzDlPTKch4=.gif

I've yet to hear any guitar work from him that seems the least bit compelling to me, but he definitely seems to get a lot of kudos in that world

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, July 16, 2021 3:08 PM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

think he says on record he just dumbs it down and keeps it simple

― pure rim rest (Spottie), Friday, July 16, 2021 3:16 PM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've said before I'd like to hear him stretch out on something, maybe take some risks, make mistakes. Even in the Dead & Co footage I've seen he plays it safer than I'd like, part of why I more enjoy Billy Strings with Billy and the Kids even though you could make a case for John Mayer as the "better" guitarist. Like Mayer is obviously a guitar wiz -- if you've ever seen his guitar tik toks where he breaks stuff down, he is undeniably brilliant. But there's something about him that just can't bear to allow any cracks in the perfect facade. Even this new record, the concept, the way it's marketed, the sound, really "nails" the aesthetic. Does it do anything else?

Fwiw, part of the thing with Dead & Co, especially in the early tours, is that Bob Weir is the de facto leader and he can be weirdly risk averse for a guy who built is legacy with a band like that. There were several times I'd get really interested in what Mayer was playing during a jam, only to have Bobby ripcord and overpower him with the song's main riff to bring it back in. It's gotten a lot better in recent tours though.

"his legacy"

MORE LIKE SAAB ROCK AMIRITE

https://img.discogs.com/aEDzC0rVjpqPJTTvL1C7LDg4kSA=/fit-in/300x300/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(40)/discogs-images/R-4096718-1355103855-8401.jpeg.jpg

continuum: really good lowkey neo-soul record. so good that i look at most of what he's released since and think wtf happened to this guy

otm. Continuum is his classic, and then he abandoned that and went back to mostly middling stuff

actually remember being surprised when I first heard "Vultures", as I hadn't heard anything of his after "Your Body is a Wonderland", and was like "this is THAT guy?"

"vultures" sounds like a freaking maxwell song, it is outrageously wonderful

Surprised “vultures” was not released as a single, it’s one of his best songs and sounds to me very radio friendly.

I did have to endure an xgau panel paper where he went all-in on "Waiting for the World to Change."

But yes, agree that Continuum is his definitive album.

Great production, great musicianship and his songwriting improves a lot from previous efforts. It’s the one that best balances his pop, rock, blues, soul influences into a John Mayer cohesive style. This album and the live performances around the era showed and undeniable skill and knowledge, shame he wasn’t up to continue on this path.

i dont trust myself sounds like a dangelo song

that song was weird for me because I got into this album because the girl I was dating at the time was obsessed and both of us identified HEAVILY with "I Don't Trust Myself" lyrically at the time, but for different reasons.

was a beautiful bonding experience listening to the songs together.

best Mayer song is Back to You imo.