John Mayer - Fighting Against Gravity

In Bridgeport, Connecticut - a place so close to New York yet in some ways so distant - John Mayer was born in 1977. His career has been an irrepressible blues outpouring in multiform shades, and if one wants to find a period in which this urge was most hidden, that moment probably has to be sought in the early part of his musical journey, an itinerary that set out from Fairfield - a town near his birthplace - and arrived all the way to the wild scenery of far-off Montana.

Son of two teachers from the American upper-middle class, John is the heart of the family; not out of preference or hierarchy, but simply because he's the middle child, leaning slightly toward the side of his brother Ben. Older than Ben and younger than Carl, he grew up admiring Michael J. Fox's guitar solo at the "Enchantment Under the Sea" dance, dreaming of emulating his feats. When he picks up a guitar, around the age of thirteen, he starts listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan, BB King, Otis Rush and Albert King. If he's not at school, John is in his room, where solos ring out, some flawless, others rough around the edges; the former coming from the stereo, the latter from his modest amplifier. At seventeen, during a forced hospital stay due to a heart problem, he feels something taking shape inside him, slowly taking root. Mayer himself will describe that period as the moment when a songwriter was being born within his body. Some time later, following an imaginary thread running from instinct to the strings of a guitar, Mayer decides to move to Boston to pursue musical studies.

Why Georgia, Why?

At nineteen, however, shortly after starting out at Berklee College of Music, Mayer realizes that the academic environment isn't for him, and that it's too tight a suit for his artistic drive. It's during this period that he meets Clay Cook, with whom, not long after, he moves to Atlanta, playing one venue after another and tapping into the fertile humus that the city's music scene has to offer. The project is called Lo-fi Masters, and it plays out in pubs and clubs - one above all, Eddie's Attic, where a performance is recorded and put online, spreading for the first time, on a wide scale, the name of the kid from Bridgeport.

Mayer moves on, sowing seeds in the hope of reaping something, like any other artist at the start of a journey, pulled in two opposite directions by the allure of a dream and the disenchantment of reality. During one of his performances at the SXSW Music Conference, some scouts from Aware Records are in attendance, and, favorably impressed, they give him the chance to record Room For Squares, what will become John Mayer's debut album. To be precise, his first "non-self-produced" album, since the label had already been keeping an eye on the kid for a while - ever since the release of Inside Wants Out, a nine-song EP that Columbia would reissue three years later.

Inside Wants Out (self-produced, 1999) coalesces around acoustic guitar and the warm - at times bleary - voice of a young man who sings, above all, of love affairs, finished stories, encounters and chances lost at the bottom of an empty wine glass. The production is anything but polished, complete with performance flubs (as in "Comfortable"), and the result is a body of sketches that recall early Dave Matthews and certain Radiohead (with an unmistakable nod to "Karma Police" in "Victoria").

Had Mayer continued down this minimalist, acoustic path, he would have become an artist in the vein of Jack Johnson, before Jack Johnson had even come along. History, however, seen through today's eyes, tells quite a different story.

In a kind of male counterpart to the young Alanis Morissette (the one who came after her early dance-pop period), Mayer gathers together ideas that matured in some occasional bedroom across the eastern United States, during idle afternoons and sleepless nights. Helping him out is another John, John Alagia, already a producer for Dave Matthews, Vertical Horizon and Ben Folds Five. "An anthology of three years of work", Mayer would later call it. And so Room For Squares, initially released under the Aware label, develops what was deemed praiseworthy - though only embryonically expressed - on Inside Wants Out, trimming away the excess and adding new elements.

The first track on the list, as well as the first single, "No Such Thing" - already featured on the EP - is everything that the youth of America's upper-middle class can express through the concept of "rebellion": “I wanna run through the halls of my high school/ I wanna scream at the top of my lungs/ I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world/ Just a lie you got to rise above”. And yet credit must be given to Mayer, himself a son of this American middle class, for having done something daring; a step beyond the ordinary: dropping out of school in Boston and throwing himself into the non-academic music world, plunging into a hazy future in which the lights of success and the spotlight are barely visible pinpricks. It will be with "Your Body Is A Wonderland" (the second and more successful single) that the young man gives his career a decisive turn; that is, as often happens, with the song that the author himself would go on to disown time and again. Syrupy and sticky, "Your Body Is A Wonderland" is a plastic radio-saturating earworm that stands in stark contrast to the album's best track, "Why Georgia"; the latter and "Your Body Is A Wonderland", in fact, are two sides of the same coin, and it's only in the former track that Mayer's true songwriting talent shines through with crystal clarity. Being gripped by the temptation to leave everything behind, to skip the Atlanta exit that would lead home, and, in the end, giving up. That is "Why Georgia", in all its freshness and melodic variety.

Room For Squares (Aware, Columbia; 2001) is a pot-pourri of pop-rock quotations and influences. In this sense, Sting, Dave Matthews and Michael Franks are just some of the most audible echoes. "My Stupid Mouth", "Neon" and "Back To You", compared to their versions on Inside Wants Out, are fleshed out in their arrangements, while the new "City Love" is a slow blues, a Stevie Ray Vaughan repainted with a fresh coat, forged in the new millennium, that melts into a Frank Sinatra-style refrain. It's exactly at the two-minute mark that the guitarist, with the album's first real solo, foreshadows what will happen after Heavier Things, when Mayer the guitarist will manage to break free from the artistic "cage" of Mayer the singer-songwriter. The acoustic "3x5" is a letter sent to someone who, probably, didn't want to leave with the sender; the small attached photos a pretext for accompanying an emotional process that sees Mayer forever on the move. The destination is uncertain, but what seems to matter most to him is the journey - and, luckily for him, this journey wins over both critics and audiences.

Heavier Things (Aware, Columbia; 2003) is the natural extension of Room For Squares, albeit with a different production approach and, this time, with greater attention to detail and richer arrangements (helped along by a touch of electronic flourishes and the recurring presence of horns). The theme of the slow-burning "Come Back To Bed" is emblematic. The girl gets up from the very bed where, in "Your Body Is A Wonderland", the love between the two of them found its fullest expression, now wounded by a few words that, once again, slipped out of a "stupid mouth". The inspiration seems to have gone into hiding somewhere, and there are too many flat stretches propping up Heavier Things, with the exception of a few isolated moments, like the opening track "Clarity" and the acoustic "Daughters".

Unlike his debut, Mayer picks up the electric guitar more often here, already showing the first signs of a stylistic shift that, a few years later, would lead him to the most important artistic leap of his career.

During this period, paradoxically, Mayer's creative spark is inversely proportional to his success. He wins a Grammy for "Daughters" (Song Of The Year), racks up several nominations, takes home platinum records, is on everyone's lips, and performs on America's most famous talk shows.

In 2003 his first live album also came out: Any Given Thursday (Columbia; Aware; SMV Enterprises), available in a CD+DVD edition.

Faced with success, tangible and solid in the form of trophies and money, John Mayer wavers and finds himself dazed: it's the price to pay for having dared, and managed, to turn his dream into reality.

Playing in his bedroom and becoming a kid again

Usually, when I was in my bedroom playing, I used to pretend I was on a stage, in front of thousands of people. Now that I'm on a stage, I pretend I'm in my bedroom.

(John Mayer)

On a couple of tracks on Heavier Things, the drum stool is taken by Steve Jordan, an established session player who had already worked with – to name a few – Keith Richards, Neil Young, Robert Cray, Cat Stevens and Bill Evans. Mayer calls him back into service to shape a microcosm in which to rediscover the pure, healthy joy of playing. A chain of events leads to the originally planned bassist, Willie Weeks, being replaced by Pino Palladino. The synergy is total and all-consuming, because, yes, what you play matters, but how you play it matters even more. The project, known under the name "John Mayer Trio", is like an owner letting the dog off its leash to run free in the park; it's John Mayer setting himself free and becoming a kid again. This time it's not the blues as a starting point, but the blues as a destination. Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles, a few old songs and a handful of unreleased tracks are what make up Try!, recorded live with Mayer, armed with his now-trusty Fender Stratocaster, swinging between the touch of Eric Clapton and that of Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Try! (Aware, Columbia; 2005) successfully retraces various phases of North American music through the straight-ahead "Who Did You Think I Was", the acid-toned atmosphere conjured by the wah-wah solo in "Good Love Is On The Way", and in "Wait Until Tomorrow", with its cathartic closing passage in thirds; Mayer's voice finally reveals itself in full, for what it truly is: yet another arrow in the Connecticut native's quiver. Warm, enveloping, yet at the same time full-bodied and, when needed, raspy. Everything sounds so perfectly vintage, warm and tight, that it's impossible not to feel the passion and relish the three musicians bring to and radiate through their playing. By osmosis, that passion spreads to the audience, in a process that tears down any barrier between those playing and those listening.

After uncorking and sipping some aged, but far from flat, wines, the band plays the unreleased "Vultures" and "Gravity". The latter, like a bolt from the blue, catches the stunned crowd off guard; after the first notes, the cheers are scattered: the audience doesn't know "Gravity" yet, but they'll learn to.

"I Got A Woman" opens like a sheet of paper listing the ingredients of a dish that tastes of Georgia – not the Georgia where a barely twenty-year-old Mayer was chasing scraps of success, but the Georgia of the 1950s and Ray Charles's rhythm and blues.

In the encore, "Daughters" and "Something's Missing" (from Heavier Things) stand as a manifesto of the diversity that defines Mayer's audience; after winking at the crowd drawn to the blues and the six strings, the artist flirts with the one that's been loyal to him since his pop beginnings. "Daughters", with its soul-drenched coda, sets the club ablaze; a version that serves as the link between what Mayer wanted to be (and was) and what he wants to become (and will). It won't be long now: Continuum is on its way.

Slow dancing in a room on fire

In America they'd say "he's in the zone". Mayer is in his ideal element, and if Heavier Things represented the continuation of Room For Squares, Continuum (Aware, Columbia; 2006) is the natural follow-up to Try!.

Now that the winning chemistry has been confirmed, Mayer drags Palladino and Jordan into the studio, this time not to rehearse, but to record. What emerges is a blues gem, inlaid with funk, folk, R&B and, of course, pop. Steve Jordan directs the operation alongside John Mayer, who by now is fully in command of himself and of what will end up on the record. Behind the glass, Chad Franscoviak works to make everything converge in a single direction, and luckily for him, he encounters no problems whatsoever, since the material comes out unified, cohesive and anything but rhapsodic. Continuum is a blues hemorrhage that Mayer doesn't want to stem (and knows he shouldn't). The reference point is Marvin Gaye meeting Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, SRV and Sade.

Set right in the middle of the album is "Gravity", which for Mayer is "the song I've always tried to write." One might consider "Come Back To Bed" a structural stage in the gestation of "Gravity", the failed attempt to write what would blossom three years later. In a stretch of the album that marks the shift from softness to roughness, "Gravity" sits at the opposite extreme from the latter. Over a thin veil of keyboard, Mayer's voice and Fender hover, wrapped in Jordan's drums and Palladino's bass, which spills out thick from his fingers to inject itself and reverberate in the stomach, forcibly passing through the throat, which can do nothing but swallow, as if downing a miraculous balm for the soul. "Gravity" is a sweet surrender, the gesture of letting go to slide down the slope of a pleasant swoon, ending with fading-out backing vocals, as if to say that, in the heaviness of existence, there's only one way to defeat gravity: by surrendering to it.

"Waiting On The World To Change" moves on a funky, off-beat groove from Jordan, all the way to Roy Hargrove's radiant horns. The American trumpeter's presence also enriches the liquefied "I Don't Trust Myself (With Loving You)". Ben Harper lends his fingers to "Belief", with lyrics that owe quite a bit to the Californian's own poetics, with an urgent pace and a chorus à-la Police; but there's little time to catch one's breath, and after the more intimate, introspective episodes of "Heart Of Life" and "Stop This Train" (both marked by a "strum-and-hit" right hand that would become a genuine trademark of the Bridgeport guitarist), the revisiting of "Bold As Love" revives the Trio's raw sound and is a time bomb, set to explode at the moment of the guitar solo — the finest in John Mayer's entire discography.

The sensual "Slow Dancing In A Burning Room" bends space-time and gathers the shards of a relationship slowly fraying, like fabric worn down by time. In this soul-blues ballad, Mayer reaches the poetic catharsis that makes this slice of Continuum the highest point of his career. He will never manage to confirm himself at this level again.

Continuum maintains a surprisingly high baseline quality, the epitome of a maturity finally reached. Talent — in songwriting and on the instrument — was never lacking; if anything, before 2006, inspiration had only ever accompanied him intermittently. Now Mayer is mature, talented and inspired; the first two qualities, as is inevitable, would remain constants up to the present day.

The EP The Village Sessions (Aware, Columbia; 2006), though a dispensable detour in Mayer's discography, is, all things considered, a successful experiment; five songs from Continuum, plus one from Try!, are reworked in acoustic form, featuring Ben Harper. Above all, the reinterpretations of "Slow Dancing In A Burning Room" and "Belief" deserve a mention, the latter nominated, in this very version, for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance at the 2008 Grammys.

Where The Light Is: John Mayer Live In Los Angeles (the DVD version is highly recommended!) is the most faithful portrait of the American musician's career, from his beginnings up to 2008. The recording captures, like a comprehensive snapshot, the acoustic Mayer, the electro-blues Mayer and the pop Mayer, complete with a shifting line-up throughout the show. Two hours of music that start from the very beginning, namely Room For Squares (specifically "Neon") and close with the final track of Continuum, "I'm Gonna Find Another You".

Just a great figure eight… or tiny infinity?

The idea for the new album's title stems from reading a literary work: "On Killing" by Dave Grossman; inside the book there's a direct reference to another work: "Battle Studies", by Ardant Du Picq. Mayer's interest in war and everything orbiting the concept of "homo homini lupus" has a strong impact on the gestation of the new record. The location of the recordings, on the other hand, contributes to a move toward sounds typical of Californian rock. Markedly more melodic than Continuum, Battle Studies (Columbia, 2009) proves to be an album meticulously thought out in every detail and is the product of all the Trio's forces, this time, however, backed by a larger number of musicians. The result is more complex and, at times, almost grandiloquent. Battle Studies thus comes across as more cumbersome and dense than its predecessor, losing naturalness and taking on an air of artificiality. "Heartbreak Warfare", ethereal, turns on a play of delay and volume swell that distantly recalls U2's "Zooropa" ("Lemon"). The following "All We Ever Do Is Say Goodbye" and "Half Of My Heart" (the latter featuring Mayer's then-partner Taylor Swift) wouldn't sound out of place on the tracklist of "Hard Candy" by Counting Crows. "Who Says", with the same fingerstyle as "Stop This Train" and "Heart Of Life", is the most intimate, autobiographical song John Mayer had written up to that point. Acoustic guitar in his arms and Jordan on brushes, Mayer rocks his weary melancholy along a thread of a question: who says I can't just drop everything? In substance it's a "Why Georgia" eight years on: "Who Says" is the awareness that losing everything would be madness, but, in the same breath, it's the cradle of a honeyed consolation: knowing that he could do it.

"Assassin", dead centre of the album, is a love song with slick, crowd-pleasing lyrics that manages to lock words and music together perfectly. The mood is that of a thriller movie, but the film, in this case, has a predictable ending. Mayer's credibility in episodes like this one, where he talks about glasses of wine and white curtains draping the modern apartment where his next sexual "prey" lies in wait, is stretched to the breaking point, and the process is so overblown that it ends up almost ridiculous. "Edge Of Desire" smells of redemption; when Mayer takes off the leather jacket and stops posing, showing himself for what he ultimately is — a sensitive kid from an ordinary Connecticut family — he makes the most of all his abilities (“Young and full of running/ tell me where has that taken me?/ Just a great figure eight/ or a tiny infinity?”).

In the passages where the production turns more bombastic, Battle Studies loses steam: "Edge Of Desire" is the sole, brilliant exception. "Crossroads" is the album's tribute track; this time not to Jimi Hendrix, but to Robert Johnson, and the interpretation is as fun as it is convincing, without causing much surprise, since the guy is swimming in his own waters. The closing "Friends, Lovers Or Nothing", whose outro drags on into lone, playful six-string noodling, is a collage of two songs written at different times. The ballad, by the way it sounds, could easily have found a home on Continuum, and it's the most fitting way to bring down the curtain on a show that convinced only sporadically, in fits and starts.

During the recording of the new album, Mayer is diagnosed with a granuloma near his vocal cords. Through his personal blog, the artist informs fans of the forced, indefinite suspension of his musical activity. The period away from the spotlight and the press (an interview with Playboy, not exactly "nice", also cost him somewhat in terms of image), along with the inability to sing or even simply to speak, marks him decisively. He retreats to Montana: now Battle Studies and the hot recording sessions between Calabasas and Hollywood are nothing but a distant memory.

In repair: Born and Raised e Paradise Valley

In 2012 John Mayer changes his look. A heavy coat covers a loose shirt, and a Texan hat sits atop his head, above hair that now falls to his shoulders. His boots stamp out a full rhythm, like a foot on the floor of a Montana farmhouse, where Mayer has finally found refuge, comfort and peace, after his parents' separation and the harrowing vocal-cord problem, finally resolved. Only far from the social whirl can there be the "birth and growth" of a new singer-songwriter, now closer to Dylan-esque folk and to the Neil Young of "After The Gold Rush". The acoustic guitar becomes prominent again, but now light years from the pop of his early career, since it ties into rustic, country atmospheres. The line-up has naturally been entirely reshuffled; under Don Was's supervision, alongside the frontman are Sean Hurley (bass), Aaron Sterling (drums and percussion) and Chuck Leavell (keyboards), plus various guests in the musical gathering: Chris Botti, no stranger to collaborating with Mayer (see the enchanting rendition of Sinatra's "In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning" on the David Letterman Show), introduces the album's best track, "Walt Grace's Submarine Test, January 1967", drawn from a true story; Jim Keltner contributes to the fun blues of "Something Like Olivia", where a legitimate doubt lingers: is the Olivia Mayer sings about perhaps a guitar?; Greg Leisz appears in several tracks, and Sara Watkins in the near-closing "A Face To Call Home".

There's also no shortage of what could be called some of the artists who inspired the author of Born And Raised (Columbia, Sony, 2012) while writing it, namely David Crosby and Graham Nash, both present (on pedal steel and vocals respectively) on the title track. Born And Raised is concrete proof that John Mayer has completely shed the armor that used to protect and hide him; now his life is told without filters, even in its most intimate matters (“I got a mom/ I got a dad/ but they do not have each other”). "Age Of Worry", with its Celtic flavor, is the most majestic track, compared to the hushed "If I Ever Get Around To Living" and "Speak For Me", while "Queen Of California", the opening song, also carries Joni Mitchell within the weave of its verses: “Joni wrote Blue in her house by the sea/ I gotta believe there’s another colour waiting on me/ To set me free”. Mayer's color now is the brown of Montana earth; dark, yes, but also pure and clean, no longer the black of the recent past he has left behind.

A year on from Born And Raised, John Mayer has no intention whatsoever of abandoning the path he's taken, dusty in summer, lily-white in winter when covered in snow. Don Was is still on hand as guide. Paradise Valley (Columbia, Sony, 2013) falls in line with Born And Raised, albeit with slight structural differences, such as the repeated return of electric guitar over acoustic. The paradise valley in question is still that of Montana, where Mayer carries out his personal estrangement from the urban, chaotic world in which Battle Studies found its reason for being; now, amid forests and firewood, there's no war left to fight, and the old battles find no place here, because what John Mayer is aiming for is an armistice with himself. "Dear Marie", from this standpoint, is a tender, imagined letter the singer-songwriter writes to the girl he loved as a teenager, now a grown woman. If artistic maturity had already been reached, now it's human maturity that's at stake. Mayer wonders what Marie thinks today, hidden away in who knows which corner of the planet, when she sees his face on magazine covers. What links the first part of the song to the final verse is a hypothesis soaked in hope: "Dear Marie/ Do you still believe in me?". "I'm not what you read about out there, I've always stayed the same," Mayer seems to be telling Marie. It matters little that the song's coda winks at arena shows, laying carbon paper under Mumford & Sons-style sing-alongs; the result is sincere and, on the whole, likeable. "Who You Love" (a duet with his new partner at the time, Katy Perry) sits on the same wavelength: "you love who you love", and the intent seems to be to assert the authenticity of a relationship like so many others, a love story like millions of others around the world. "Wildfire" is split in two; one part at the top of the album and one in the middle, featuring Frank Ocean on vocals.

Born And Raised and Paradise Valley undoubtedly form John Mayer's most autobiographical and direct pairing of albums; yet his songwriting never turns in on itself, always searching instead for human connection. "Wildfire" (part one), the already-mentioned "Dear Marie" and "On The Way Home" thrive on audience response, in a two-way process built on that give-and-take which, throughout his career, John Mayer has never shaken off — if anything, he's always pursued it.

In 2017 came The Search For Everything, his seventh studio album. The thrill of anticipation and the appetite for a binge-listen, for those who already had the two preview EPs — "Wave One" and "Wave Two" — in their headphones, dissolved along the way. For them, it must have been hard to consider the album as a continuum rather than a mere collection of fragments stitched together.

Marketing aside, The Search For Everything ultimately came out as a perfectly normal album, an ordinary forty-five minutes of music. Twelve tracks and two souls welded into one, not unlike the ones that have inhabited Mayer throughout his whole career. There's more than one link to the gorgeous Continuum, because the Trio (Palladino, Mayer and Jordan) returns, and because the blues is back — the very blues that, on the previous two albums, had ceded the stage to roots and folk in the vein of Neil Young.

So in between "You're Gonna Live Forever In Me" and "I'm Gonna Find Another You" it doesn't feel like ten years have passed — more like just a handful of moments. “I’m never gonna find another you
/ Still like to leave the party early/ and go home, babe”, he sings at the start of the album, in that strawberry-milkshake of a song "Still Feel Like Your Man".

And yet, since that far-off 2006, Mayer has grown. For the better, because he's picked up a few tricks of the trade: dosing out his guitar parts and getting maximum impact from minimum effort ("Helpless", for instance, is embarrassingly simple, yet so direct and sharp that it can't help but hit you in the gut); for the worse, because the production, in more than one spot, feels like a lab-grown creature, so precise, clean and sterile is it. "Love On The Weekend" — or "Split Screen Sadness" a decade and a half later — for example, is a blend of beats as sticky as the little colored hand inside a bag of crisps, propped up by the reverb of an electric guitar that's called into play with carefully measured cadences.

More artistically open, Mayer spits out musical influences he's swallowed over the years out of passion, out of profession, or both at once. The sound of "Moving On And Getting Over" sprays a bit of Heat into the air and brings to mind a line the artist tweeted in 2013, shortly after the release of Beyoncé's album: "Everyone can have their own opinion on 'Rocket', but that it sounds incredible is beyond question". A bit of gelatinous hip-hop dots "The Search For Everything", but so does a bit of Grateful Dead — more than predictable, that one — and of cool jazz: the intro and the slow-motion interlude of "Still Feel Like Your Man" are like yellow post-its reading "Mayer has played with Chick Corea, John Scofield, Manolo Badrena, Wallace Roney, Chris Botti and Herbie Hancock". A cringeworthy, winking title like "Emoticon di un'onda" hides a gorgeous melodic opening that tells of a dissonance eating away at a man's soul. Her heart sits where his head should be, but it's only a wave, bound to pass.

The clock on John Mayer's DeLorean with Sob Rock seems instead set to 1985. In other words, the annus mirabilis of Robert Zemeckis, Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. The cover, after all, speaks for itself. The singer-songwriter and guitarist from Bridgeport stands by a window. His pose with the ever-present guitar is proud, while pastel colors soften the image. Framing it all are faded letters with the little pink triangles so typical of the 80s. Sob Rock, then, is a title that says it all. But rather than sobbing, Mayer lights things up with ten songs that revisit yacht-rock conventions, elsewhere blue-eyed soul, alternating with a series of pop- and AOR-leaning polish.

Listing all the names that come to mind at various points on this record — the eighth of the American artist's career — could end up being an exercise in style for its own sake.

Michael McDonald? Ned Doheny? Christopher Cross? Toto? Well, it would be interesting to gather a sample of listeners and uncover the many possible parallels. But paradoxically, that very game of free association between one reference and another is the strength of an album that offers a range of solutions as simple as they are thoroughly engaging.

Naturally, there's no shortage of bluesy flourishes with the usual flawless solos, as in the opener "Last Train Home", whatever anyone says, one of those songs that just won't let go.

Mayer doesn't hide. He's well aware he's living in a bygone era, even when he sings of a love during the closing credits: "I'm not a fallen angel, i just fell behind. I'm out of luck and i'm out of time. If you don't wanna love me, let me go".

Just as sticky is the refrain of "New Light", the most successful single of the bunch (100 million views on YouTube should say it all), with its sly, swaggering stride. The same goes for the other "hit", "Wild Blue", complete with yet another half-hearted bluesy detour.

"This is my screenplay, this is my movie", Mayer stated when presenting the album. Some might notice too much dust on the reels. But Sob Rock remains an honest "film". An album suspended in time, with a potentially "analgesic" effect.

Contributions by Giuliano Delli Paoli ("Sob Rock")

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