He grabs a bag of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies as he leads me up the stairs to the modest recording studio on the second floor. On the studio wall, a framed platinum album for Room for Squares and a black-and-white photo of Jimi Hendrix playing at the Isle of Wight festival; on the desk, a multitude of hard drives and unopened mail, including a box containing the Proactiv skin-care system, ordered from a TV infomercial. ("If they jacked the price up to fifty dollars a bottle, I'd still pay it," he says.) "This room is the pride and joy of my life," he coos, staring out of the windows at uptown Manhattan. "Look at the view. So cool." And then he adds a classic Mayer non sequitur: "I fear snipers sometimes, and then I have to move out of the way."
Huh?
"I have weird phobias," he says. "I'm really afraid of suicide. I'm the last person who will ever commit suicide, but I have a fear of suicide. Like, I hope I don't come down with it. The night I finished the record in L.A., I was on the computer, sitting next to the balcony, and I was like, 'By six o'clock this morning I will be facedown on the pavement beneath the balcony, but I can't help it. What if it's fate?' "
Mayer describes himself as "a psychological hypochondriac." It's unexpected, because Mayer — for all his hyperkinetic energy — does not seem like a stress case. He is perpetually upbeat, relentlessly funny and not a moper. "I don't understand moodiness," he says. "I refuse to give my attention to anybody who sees their own mood as a private barometer for the way the rest of the room should be. My dedication is to staying nice and mild."
There is a song on Heavier Things called "Something's Missing" that ends with Mayer making a checklist of life's necessities. He sings, "Friends? Check/Money? Check/Well-slept? Check/Opposite sex? Check/Guitar? Check/Microphone? Check/Messages waiting on me when I come home? Check."
So what's missing?
"I remember coming off tour feeling really lost, like, 'Where am I, what should I do?' It's like that feeling between hunger and thirst and arousal and desire all at the same time. I get that feeling a lot — I'd say about once a day for maybe half an hour. I think it's just sport at this point. It's total self-absorption to the max. Most people think of self-absorbed as 'I'm thinking about me instead of about you.' But I'm self-absorbed to the point where I'm thinking about me instead of the movie I'm watching. Self-absorbed as in, 'What happens if I flip out and all of a sudden I'm at the movies and I just want to go home?' "
He says that his tendency toward panic pays off, because it's "the same mechanism that allows me to write songs." It's also the mechanism that keeps Mayer completely drug- and alcohol-free. "I've made a commitment to being present at all times," he says as we walk from his apartment to the nearby Virgin Megastore. "And I'm such an anxiety person, I'd worry that the drugs were a trap. Like, 'I wanna get out of this high!' I already walk down the street and think I'm losing my breath for no reason — just fuck with my own breathing."
In the back lounge of his tour bus, Mayer is still dressed in his sweat-soaked clothes from tonight's show at the Tweeter Center in Camden, New Jersey. He looks in the mirror, grabs an Afro pick and combs his hair flat against his head. Then he swoops his bangs upward, so that he's got a curlicue that wouldn't look out of place in a John Waters flick. "I wrote a fan letter to Michael J. Fox when I was eleven, asking how I could get my hair like his," he blurts. "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."
A week after the show in Camden, I meet Mayer's parents, Margaret and Richard — a retired schoolteacher and principal, respectively — at their home in Fairfield, Connecticut. John is the middle child between his older brother Carl, 27, and his younger brother Ben, 24, and Margaret says that her pop-star son was always "a peaceable kid." She has laid out a plate of Milanos on the table on the back porch of the home the Mayers have lived in since 1984. "He would not demand a lot of attention," she says. "He would go off and do things by himself."
Before he picked up guitar, John wanted to be a radio announcer. "Maybe it was the booming baritone or the glib delivery," he says. "I used to sit in the bathroom with the lights out and just talk. Just riff. I'd go for hours. I also used to record radio shows in my bedroom. It was, 'WJOHN, your Number Two radio station, because you're always going to have one better than this.' "
Everything changed in 1990. John's neighbor gave him a tape of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble. Listening to it, Mayer had a revelation. "It was like, 'What is this, and where is the rest of it?' " he says. "It was the sound of perfection for me. That sounds totally corny: My life was black-and-white and then it was Technicolor. But I just remember going on this hunt for the rest of it."
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