John Mayer: The "Continuum" Era

[singingsparrow]

John Mayer is pushing to release his third album later this year, possibly in late summer/early autumn.

The tentatively-titled new album "Continuum" was originally aiming for an earlier release until the sudden success of "Daughters" forced John Mayer back into the promotion circuit of "Heavier Things", where the album also enjoyed a resurgence in sales and upgraded to double platinum.

Here's some rumors and details on "Continuum"

1) Kanye West may possibly return the favor to John Mayer on the new record in co-production, songwriting, etc.

2) John Mayer has recently collaborated with blues legend B.B King. This may also be an indication to the direction musically Mayer wants to go.

3) Possible titles include the following:

"Trust Myself"
"Hummingbird"
"Over and Over"
"Another Kind of Green"
"Simmering"
"In Your Atmosphere"

*

Sincerely,
Noah Eaton

[kellydicted]

I've always been a big John Mayer fan so I'm excited!

[soulster]

SingingSparrow said:

1) Kanye West may possibly return the favor to John Mayer on the new record in co-production, songwriting, etc.

It seems I just returned from Mars, cos I didn't know JM collaborated with KW! :o Wow, thats an odd, but definitely exciting collabo

[automyskin89]

I Can't Wait! :)

[shark cousteau]

yea their song is called bittersweet

[Night Senses]

Hector said:

I've always been a big John Mayer fan so I'm excited!

Very amped for John to return, even though it seems like he never left because I'm still frequently jamming to Room For Squares and Heavier Things. Those rumored titles look very promising. Here's to hoping this album resembles a lot more from Room For Squares than Heavier Things, though. I love both albums, but the former is still his best work, IMO.

[singingsparrow]

JustifiedMusicLady said:

Very amped for John to return, even though it seems like he never left because I'm still frequently jamming to Room For Squares and Heavier Things. Those rumored titles look very promising. Here's to hoping this album resembles a lot more from Room For Squares than Heavier Things, though. I love both albums, but the former is still his best work, IMO.

Those two releases are almost equally as strong in my opinion.

I guess it depends on what style suits you better. "Heavier Things" is a lot more atmospheric and Coldplay-ish than "Room For Squares", which that was essentially more folky and radio-ready.

Some of my favorite songs of his stem from both releases. "Why Georgia, "No Such Thing", "Back To You" and "83" all made the debut strong, while "Clarity", "Split Screen Sadness" and "Something's Missing" really brought "Heavier Things" together.

The outlook for "Continuum" looks promising to me.

Sincerely,
Noah Eaton

[Night Senses]

SingingSparrow said:

I guess it depends on what style suits you better. "Heavier Things" is a lot more atmospheric and Coldplay-ish than "Room For Squares", which that was essentially more folky and radio-ready.

I don't know what it is, really. I love both albums to pieces, but Room For Squares has a very timeless quality to it. Heavier Things is a great album, but lyrically and melodically, I think he did a more thorough job with the former.

Still, I can't argue that both albums are excellent. Overall, I have yet to be disappointed by John, and I'm optimistic about this new project. I'll welcome it with an open ear!

[johnm1120]

I heard him say on Carson that he wants to go more electric guitar on this album.

[singingsparrow]

chbigemi said:

I heard him say on Carson that he wants to go more electric guitar on this album.

That probably means it won't be like either of the first two albums necessarily.

It may or may not have more songs like "Love Song For No One" or "Bigger Than My Body"

Sincerely,
Noah Eaton

[automyskin89]

I'm so excited for this album!

[Gold Soundz]

chbigemi said:

I heard him say on Carson that he wants to go more electric guitar on this album.

And he's also said he wants to start back at the acoustic guitar and make it more raw. So who knows what he really wants..

[soulster]

John Mayer Gears Up To Release Two New Projects

08/01/2005 4:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
LAUNCH Radio Networks

John Mayer has two new projects in the pipeline. The first is a live album with his newly-formed John Mayer Trio, while the second is his next studio CD, titled Continuum. No official release dates have been announced for either record, but Billboard.com reports that the live disc will be out in December.

Mayer has spent the last few months writing material for Continuum and said he enjoys getting some one-on-one time with his own songs before anyone gets to hear them. "That's kind of like my freedom,” Mayer said. “It's kind of like the part for me that's really great because you know, when everybody is sharing my music -- and that's the goal -- is that as many people as possible listen to this music that I make -- it's really comforting for me to listen to the stuff that people haven't heard yet. That's mine still. That's like my friend. That's not everyone else's friend."

The John Mayer Trio will kick off a tour on September 6 in San Francisco. Mayer will also open up a few shows for the Rolling Stones this fall.

[reception]

NEW YORK (AP)
John Mayer has writer's block - and he wants your help. He's calling on fans to make a song out of some lyrics that didn't make it onto his upcoming album.

"I'm inviting all aspiting songwrtiters to write their own chords and melodies around my lyrics," Mayer writes in the Septermber issue of Esquire, on newsstands Aug. 15. "You can tell people we wrote a song together."

Mayer, who has written a monthly column for Esquire for more than a year, urges people to send a CD of their song to the magazine's music department. The lyrics and information on submissions, due Sept. 30, can be found in the upcoming issue.

One line reads: "I've got dreams to remember, I've got days to forget/I've got some phone calls in to God but he ain't called me back just yet."

He writes that the lyrics were left over from a tune intended for "Continuum." The song ended up an instrumental, so Mayer is "looking to make some use of the time and emotion I spent writing (the lyrics)."

The best submissions will be featured on Esquire's Web site. Mayer will pick the winner, who will receive a Fender John Mayer Signature Stratocaster guitar.

[singingsparrow]

I find it ironic that it's actually the music he has writer's block with and not the lyrics.

Mayer is one of the best guitarists out there right now, and I yearn to hear a studio record from him that really showcases the full range of his guitar breadth and agility.

Sincerely,
Noah Eaton

[reception]

Ryan Seacrest, bride Lori Wolfson and John Mayer

It could've been a scene out of Wedding Crashers.

When Ryan Seacrest and John Mayer were hanging out with friends recently at the bar in L.A.'s Four Seasons Hotel, a bridesmaid spotted the celebs and invited them to her pal's reception next door. So around 1 a.m., Seacrest and Mayer hit the dance floor to congratulate the ecstatic bride, Lori Wolfson, and her groom, Lee Johnson.

[Chromeozone]

Um. John Mayer needs to cut his hair, seriously. Not a good look.

[sleepy time]

He also needs to stop hanging out with Ryan Seacrest.

[Robert J]

His new article in Esquire seems to imply that the title isn't tentative, and there's also a bunch of lyrics which may or may not end up on the album.

[reception]

Eric Clapton and John Mayer perform on Saturday's CNN "How You Can Help" show for the Hurricane Katrina victims.

[reception]

Buddy Guy and John Mayer recently recorded Sly & The Family Stones "You Can Make It If You Try," which is slated to be featured on an upcoming Sly album.

[reception]

On their current concert tour, the John Mayer Trio will be opening for The Rolling Stones for three of their dates.

[reception]

Happy birthday! John Mayer turns 28 today.

[reception]

John Mayer has the blues

[Purple Dreams]

www.groovevolt.com/paparazzi/

JOHN MAYER CALLS KANYE WEST "A LITTLE WOMAN."

"Easy to learn lifetime to master, but you don't get that much pu--y with a cello," John Mayer said during a luncheon for Rolling Stone magazine Tuesday (December 16.)

And that wasn't all Mayer said. Seems that Mayer is looking to go in a different musical direction. "I'm done with acoustic guitar, balladeering, I'm done with acoustic groove. Acoustic groove sucks so bad," the boyish singer-songwriter moaned. "I've sucked the flavor out of it."

Speaking about his last hit single, he said, "I never wanted 'Daughters' to be a single."

As the luncheon continued it became very clear that Mayer would not be holding back. The singer spoke about his love for D'Angelo's album Voodoo, "[it] is one of the greatest records of all time."

About Kanye West, Mayer said, "I think Kanye West is a great artist with a bad idea. I respect his talent and working with him, he gives not a thought to the possibility of failure, but he really is just a little woman. He thinks too much about the character."

[reception]

Rolling Stone Q&A Podcast: John Mayer
Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, bolstered by Clapton and King, makes the move to blues

When John Mayer arrived on the scene with 2001's Room for Squares, the Connecticut kid was touted as a mature singer-songwriter with bagful of pensive, carefully crafted pop tunes. The album went on to sell more than four million copies and score a Grammy for the runaway single "Your Body Is a Wonderland." And when, two years later, Heavier Things was released, Mayer scored again, taking Song of the Year for the acoustic strummer "Daughters."

But Mayer, now twenty-nine, is shaking up his image -- and letting loose his guitar chops -- with his high-octane blues outfit, the John Mayer Trio. Taking a cue from the trio efforts of personal heroes Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn, Mayer reached out to drummer Steve Jordan (Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones) and bassist Pino Palladino (the Who, Jeff Beck). With great chemistry but little rehearsal time, the group hit the road, and the result is the new live album, Try! -- and a new sound that has been shaking up the making of Mayer's next solo record.

In a New York recording studio on December 6th, Rolling Stone spoke with John Mayer about his ripping new live record, jamming with B.B. King, spending money like Eric Clapton and unleashing his kung fu "deathblow" on his next studio album.

The Rolling Stone Q&A Podcast with John Mayer is excerpted below.

I thought we'd start out with how you met Steve Jordan and Pino Palladino . . .

I met Steve when he came in to play drums on a couple tracks on Heavier Things, my second record, and loved the experience. I loved the idea of composing something for him to play, as soon as he came in to play drums on these songs that I'd already written. He really kind of opened my mind up, on a rhythmic level. And then we kind of lost touch. But we started to play around town, just playing collaborations with people. I would go do a record with Herbie Hancock, and I'd get there, and the band is Steve Jordan playing drums and Willie Weeks playing bass. Playing with Steve made me instantly better by the day, as a musician.

I honestly don't remember how I ended up saying, "Would you work on my record with me?" It just happened. And Pino came on: He initially came out to New York to do a tsunami benefit in January of '05, and the rehearsal was just unbelievable.

You guys played a Hendrix tune, right?

We did a Hendrix tune called "Bold as Love," which is one of my favorite Hendrix tunes. I'm a big believer in a different Jimi Hendrix than most people know.

But the rehearsal was a real fresh injection of muse, you know? I felt at the time that I was coming to the end of this concept of being the "acoustic groove guy," you know, and it just so happened to intersect with finding these guys to play with. But above that, to hear it all together -- it's always nice when something you want to work also happens to naturally work a lot . . . When something conceptually makes sense and pragmatically makes sense, that is one of the best times in life . . . And it opened up this part of my brain I was waiting on, that next phase.

Did you know that you wanted to bring other people in, with this whole trio idea -- because of Clapton and Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn?

I knew that I wanted to take myself out, rather than put myself in. I wanted to take myself out of the running for this invisible pop prize that just doesn't exist . . . When I do the blues thing, when I do the Trio thing, when I do the new record [Continuum], there's something about it that is a little bit less jockeying for position. It's hard to explain.

I think it's related to you winning a couple of Grammys, for instance, and you're feeling like, "Now what?" You told Rolling Stone that you didn't care if you never won another Grammy, if maybe you alienated a few people with this new record. That didn't seem to be an issue for you.

What I mean by that is the age I'm at now is no age to consider yourself done, or fully realized -- like this is the culmination of all you are, and all you have to do now is just be this. That's a terribly confining thought. The music that I used to play, and still to an extent play, . . . it's started to do less for me. And that's music -- music comes and goes. Sometimes it does less for you, and then you go on the hunt for more music . . . My love of music is changing and progressing the way that yours is . . . The question is, Why am I bound to making the same kind of music if you're not bound to listening to the same kind of music?

Were you just listening more and more to certain people, certain records?

I was starting to listen to certain types of music and really break it down and understand that there's a timelessness to soul music. There's a constantly applicable nature to soul music, whereas sometimes pop music can be a periodical. "Your Body Is a Wonderland" is at its best at this point a throwback to 2002. It's a where-were-you-in-2002 song. That is really, honest to God, the most you could hope for as artist. The most you can hope for is for somebody to go, "Oh, I think very fondly on that time in my life."

You think pop music dates more easily?

Yes! Absolutely. That's why there's "Eighties" music. There's never been a decade of music more branded in its time than Eighties music -- and because Eighties music doesn't have a lot of soul in it. With soul, the power in that feeling is what will always be there.

When you say "soul music," who do you mean? Because I think of different people . . .

I mean everybody. Honest to God, what comes to mind is, [sings] "And now you're giving me, giving me, nothing but shattered dreams, shattered dreams." It's fun to sing -- you go, "Aw, that's cute!" But listen to Ray Charles, and it's the same gut punch it was thirty, forty years ago. It's so much more visceral, so much more, like, stemming out of the dirt. And sometimes the pop music that I listen to, or the pop music that I make, comes out of the mind, and it affects your ability to be emotional in the right way.

I just think of the music that I can still go back to, like Ray Charles or Jimi Hendrix or Buddy Guy or Eric Clapton. These are guys who just dug into the ground, you know? And I think of the music I loved two years ago, and I don't love it anymore but I revisit it and go, "Wow, that was fun two years ago." So I'm just investigating [that difference].

And you've actually had the chance to play with a lot of those people at this point. Has that been a part of it, that thrill?

Yeah. It's been a part of everything. The greatest thing that's happened in my life is for people like Eric or Buddy or B.B. to do something very rare, which is to accept me, to accept a younger guy, a guy who's made pop music but wants to play blues. To be accepted like that is all I need. You know, Albert Collins used to say at the end of a show, "Thank you for accepting me." And I thought that was such a brilliant way to say it. And that's really all it comes down to.

And for those guys, especially, I think there's this understanding in the blues lineage that it's going to be a tough time getting through to the inner circle. That you're going to have some people play goalie -- and they certainly do: "What's this white boy doing?" is kind of a stock question that you run up against at this point in the game. And it's almost like there's two levels that my relationship with those guys works on: One is that we genuinely like each other; and the other is that they acknowledge that it's going to be tough for me and they want me to know that they like me. So who cares about so-and-so from the so-and-so press, you know what I mean?

There's this moment on "Try!" where you're just talking to the audience, the bit about "where the blues is born, Fairfield, Connecticut!"

Yeah, trying to stare at the white elephant in the room and go, "Hi, I'm the white elephant. Hey, how you doing?" But I've always stood up for blues music as something that is self-anointing. There are enough things in life that people are jockeying into position to try to fake -- blues is not one of them! Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music, but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime. If you are cool enough, if there's a fifteen-year-old who's hip enough to decide that he wants to be like Freddie King, and he's going to go buy a cherry red 335 electric guitar, he's already like Freddie King. He might not play like him, but he's as much like Freddie King as Freddie King was -- in the sense that . . . it takes certain people to go, "Wait a minute this is where it's at."

I defend that. And I'm really so thankful that my heroes haven't snubbed me, because it would have broken my heart. I didn't want to meet Clapton for a long time because I didn't want him to not like me.

Did you have this theory that he'd think you were a hack or something?

I don't know. Sure. Or, "That boy rubs me wrong." But we get along great. Not to exploit a relationship, because we don't talk all the time, we keep in touch. But I need it. I need it in the sense that there's not a huge community, and I don't have a lot of people to relate to in what I'm doing. Eric was the first person that I'd ever met who loved blues and had a bunch of money. I'd never met anybody who loved blues and had a bunch of money!

Wait, where'd the "bunch of money" come in? Seems like a separate issue . . .

I'm the only person I know who's got a bunch of money. I'm not saying it just to say it. I mean to illustrate a different point: it's a lonely experience doing what I do because I'm not in a band. It's not like you get together with your four other bandmates and you all go buy Ferraris and race them to Las Vegas -- which I think would be a blast! I mean, I would love to get a royalty check and go, "Hey, guys, we got six of these this year. What do you say we take this one and let's go get Ferraris and just drive them from L.A. to Las Vegas?" That would be fantastic!

But that's not going to happen for me because I'm a solo artist. So I've always been very shy [with money]. And then you meet a guy who buys as many watches as you do, and you go, "This is great! And I can see how you react to life when you play guitar and I can see how make your life work." That was a very pivotal relationship for me, meeting Eric, figuring out how to behave.

But with the Trio, is it about seeing other groups, their live dynamic, and envying that in a way and wanting to go out and do that?

Yeah.

Because I know you guys didn't rehearse much at all before hitting the road.

No, we only rehearsed for four or five days. But that's when we wrote all the original tunes, in that streak: it was all out of pure necessity. I was so scared of being a cover band that I wrote these tunes really fast. I wrote the lyrics in the hotel rooms in the first week of the show. I wrote the lyrics for a song called "Try" in the production office in San Francisco, taped the lyrics to the monitor and sang off the monitor. I wrote the lyrics to "Good Love Is on the Way" before night two of L.A., went back from sound check, ordered room service, turned all the lights off and just went, "How bad do you want to have this song done for L.A.? Real bad. So write it." It was an amazing place to write songs from. It was just a run-and-gun thing.

Were you worried at all? Did you have this thought that your fans' reaction would be, "What the hell is this?"

A little bit. But number one, my audience is fantastic. Smart, incredibly giving . . . So if I mention in an interview that I love Albert King, people go and buy Albert King records and listen to find out what it is. And then I go and play these shows, and girls are cheering for guitar solos in these hip places to cheer where most people don't. And it's like, how did they know?

Then again, my outlook to being a musician is calibrated to being as much of a normal person as possible. If you're a normal person, then the things that you like will be normal-person likes and dislikes. If you become so refined that you refine yourself out of the game, then you're doing things that are so esoteric that they don't satisfy anybody else but you. So I like to stay as normal as possible and then hope that well, and then I do the math, and I think, "OK, I'm normal. I like what this is, so I'm thinking other people will too."

What are you talking about musically, though?

I believe in blues, and I believe that it's been misrepresented.

As sort of inaccessible?

It just needs somebody to take that blues fire and put it into a capsule that a lot of people can get into . . .

ALEX MAR

Posted Dec 16, 2005 7:08 PM

[reception]

Feb 7, 9:29 AM EST
Mayer's Album Won't Have 'Pop Sweetness'

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- John Mayer says his next album won't have the "pop sweetness" of current radio hits.

"It's a really tricky thing making music that can appeal to everybody without certain ingredients that have proven themselves as being very effective in appealing to people," Mayer recently told The Associated Press.

On his 2005 album "Try" with the John Mayer Trio, the singer-songwriter shifted gears from pop music to blues. Mayer said he hopes to continue that trend with his upcoming third solo album, promising no "pop music tricks."

"I'm not trying to write my best Coldplay song the way I've tried before," he said. "Instead I am writing what I am most prepared for writing, which is a blues or soul approach to a pop song. Hoping that in 20 years it lasts and it doesn't date itself."

Mayer's earlier work had more of what he calls "pop sweetness" - like his hit, "Your Body is Wonderland." He hopes a blues approach will keep his music timeless.

"Blues never gets dated," the guitarist said. "You listen to Huey Lewis and the News and it might be the only thing that stands out from the '80s that's still really enjoyable and not a relic."

[singingsparrow]

www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2006/06/20/john_mayer_lashes_out_at_critics

That John Mayer, he can sure crack you up.

Somehow I think one of these days he's going to talk his mouth into some trouble, LOL!

Sincerely,
Noah Eaton

[Mike]

"Waiting On the World to Change" has been added to iTunes.

[Minimalism]

Any prediction as to how much this will sell the first week? I say 200-250K. :)