John Mayer sat down for the latest episode of the Tetragrammaton podcast and revealed how he considered hanging up his guitar after battling with his sense of creativity.
LISTEN NOW: John Mayer - Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin
While preparing to kick off his 2023 solo and entirely acoustic tour, John Mayer has begun revisiting some of his earliest songs. Combining his current and past writing into one setlist, the multi-talented musician told Tetragrammaton podcast host Rick Rubin that he’s now especially self-aware, for better or for worse.
“What happens is I'll go back into rehearsal and the songs will come up on the prompter,” the 45 year old explained, “and I'll go, ‘He wrote that? That kid wrote that?’ Because I'm an adult now. And I know that I was all over the place a little bit when I was growing up, but those songs were very truthful.”
And while reliving his past through music provided him with, “beautiful ways to look at love and life,” he also revealed that it brought up a lot of self comparison. Since the beginning of his career at 22, Mayer’s songwriting has covered wide ranging topics from deep heartbreak to complicated family dynamics. Performing old songs left the musician with doubts that he had anything more to say. “I'm gonna make a bit of an admission here. I thought that I was out of road about six months ago” he revealed. “And that's okay to think you're out of, I'm not talking about retiring, but just going, ‘I might not be able to put the spin on the ball like I used to. Okay, that was a good run, and we'll do some songs occasionally.’ And then I learned that the dumbest I'll ever be is in my own sense of myself and what lies ahead for me.”
Mayer went on to explain that he’s extremely glad he kept pushing through, saying that he’s, “never been more energized to write” and play his new songs on stage. “You cannot believe the narrative at any given moment that your creative youth is over,” Mayer said. For him, it’s not so much about staying young as it is about staying creative, and with some songwriting sessions, he discovered that those two things are not actually synonymous.
“You just have to wait till you pick up the right guitar or hear the right song. You never know. You never know. And so now I'm gonna do this tour as I write my next record. Which is just the way to make me square up with who I am every night. ‘John, these are the songs you write.’ And then I go, ‘are you tired of playing all these songs? Write the next one you want.” He continued, “That's the best way to write music. Write the one you don't have yet. And after playing over and over again, I got a few I don't have yet that I wanna write.”
Regardless of age, Mayer was clear that he has no interest in retirement, and truly loves music and being involved in it. “That feeling of the energy of the music, being in the music, such a great feeling. It was the best feeling in the world and I still chase it and I still have it” he said with a smile. “I still have it, it doesn't get old. It allows you to leave it when you want to, and I take breaks. But it always regenerates.”
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To listen to the inspiring conversation in full, check out the Tetragrammaton episode here on the Audacy app. You can also relive some of Mayer’s classics by listening to Audacy's John Mayer Radio!
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