John Mayer is picking up serious speed as he cruises down a New York highway in his steel-blue BMW. "Turn on the butt massager," he says, then demonstrates the car's assortment of toys: ventilated seats, voice-activated radio, computer navigation system, built-in phone. A few minutes later, just when our asses have started to limber up, a police car pulls out behind us, siren blaring. On the side of the road, the twenty-six-year-old musician lets out a sigh of resignation, reminds himself of the etiquette in these situations — "Hands on the wheel, windows down, radio off" — and assumes the position as the cop approaches his window. "You were doing 74 in a 55," says the Officer, who obviously doesn't recognize the multiplatinum-selling Grammy winner. Mayer folds the ticket into his pocket without examining it and gets back on the road that leads to Jones Beach in Wantagh, New York, where, in a few hours, he will play for a sold-out crowd of 14,000 fans.
"I'm not going to let this ticket thing bother me," he says, more to himself than to me. Mayer's mind never lingers on one thing for very long. Behind his wide brown eyes there is a constant buzz of thought, like the purr of a computer booting and rebooting and rebooting. He talks a lot, and haphazardly, but is rarely less than articulate and often sounds as if he's quoting a lyric he has yet to write down.
Released in September, his latest album, Heavier Things, debuted at Number One and has been in the Top Twenty ever since. Out-of-the-box success is a new thing for Mayer, whose previous CD, Room for Squares, was a slow burner that was out for nearly a year before it went platinum, earned him a Grammy for "Your Body Is a Wonderland" and then went platinum two more times. Mayer sold 3 million records without any glitzy marketing push, building an audience the old-fashioned way, by touring relentlessly. With record sales sinking in the past couple of years, Mayer and artists such as Norah Jones (who toured with Mayer last year) have been able to attract an unusually broad fan base: everyone from frat boys to soccer moms.
Except for his bedroom, where clothes are strewn across the floor and on top of his unmade bed, Mayer's Manhattan apartment is neat and free of clutter. In the living room, a baby grand sits next to a taupe sectional couch, and his Grammy is perched alone on the fireplace mantel. "Want to hold it?" he says playfully, and, of course, I do. He still has the foam padding — with a cutout in the shape of the little gold gramophone — that cushioned the award in the mail; he's thinking of having it framed.
Today he is dressed in loose-fitting jeans and a brown polo shirt with a tiny embroidered silhouette of himself where the alligator might normally go. "An ill-founded merch idea," he explains, and then gestures to four light towers behind the sofa. "That's the gayest I ever got, putting four different — color gels in those lights." This duplex costs him $7,500 a month, but he thinks it's worth the expense because he wrote a record here.
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