John Mayer gets real about being John Mayer (and Taylor Swift) in the interview we can’t stop watching
You can’t argue that John Mayer gives fascinating and candid, albeit somewhat controversial, interviews. There was that notorious one with Playboy back in 2010. Now, exactly five years later, Mayer is still speaking out about the incident in a real and honest way. “In that period of time, I would have rather killed myself than been killed,” he told Ronan Farrow on MSNBC. “I was never going to wrap my Corvette around a tree. My high-speed crash was an intellectual one.”
Since then, Mayer moved to Montana, recorded two albums and has vowed to keep a relatively low profile. Slowly but surely, Mayer has been working himself back into the public eye. If you remember, he appeared on the Grammy stage alongside Ed Sheeran, Questlove, and Herbie Hancock for their collaborative performance of “Thinking Out Loud.” And, just last weekend, Mayer sat down with Ronan Farrow of MSNBC for a tell-all interview. From his inner-struggles to his appreciation for ex, Taylor Swift, the interview is chock full of kindness from Mayer. He even offered Iggy Azalea a wise piece of advice. If you’re hankering for some more Mayer honesty mixed with deadpan humor, look no further than this interview. Here are the juiciest nuggets:
On his controversial Playboy interview:
“When you invariably do find out that not everything you touch turns to gold, you’ve got a choice: You either bleed out or you tie off. . .I tied off after I went, ‘Alright, dude, you did a couple interviews where you were out of touch and being a ham and basically breakdancing into a nitroglycerin plant…Now you don’t even have the chance that everyone’s gonna love you – ever again.”
On overcoming his own personal hurdles :
“I’m a recovered ego addict. And the only way that I can be sure that I don’t relapse is to admit that I constantly have this ego addiction every day. . .The greatest moment for me was giving up the big fight — the big fight to be this thing that gets off the airplane at LAX and floats through — I have a lot of admiration and envy for people that large.”
On Taylor Swift’s decision to pull her music from Spotify:
“Artists need the person with the loudest voice to speak for them. I think that’s a really cool thing for a musician to do. There’s only two percent of the music industry that has 80 percent of the media about it. There’s like four people who get all the press. The only reason we’re talking about Taylor Swift taking Spotify on is because she’s Taylor Swift, and that’s great.”
On his advice to Iggy Azalea:
“I just wanna let you know, that this feeling you’re having — that you become successful but the world wont stop hating on you — this isn’t a broken version of success. This is the new version of success.”
On that T-Swift song, “Paper Doll”: “The song never got listened to as a song. It became a news story because of the lyrics. . .I’m not in the business of telling people what the song’s about, . .Now I can just go, ‘Look, I can say the name Taylor Swift.’ She’s an artist. I’m an artist. Everybody stop, nobody’s got an incurable cancer. We’re rich people who get to live out our dreams. Let’s just stop it.”
On success in today’s world: “There are going to be times when I make music as popular or empirically valuable as that in terms of making pop music that won’t sell as many copies and I’m fine with that. If I save a baby from a burning building and Kanye (West) saves a baby from a burning building, Kanye’s going to get more Google News hits. And I’m fine with it.”
On his career, looking back and moving forward: “I’m a musician who’s bigger than one song or one record. So it’s really about the longevity of all the work that goes together and I’m just not interested in the things that won’t last forever.”
Although the details on his new album are scant, word on the street is that it’s “deeply personal“. Hey, that’s why we first fell in love with him in the first place!
Here’s a little snippet from the interview:
