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John Mayer VibeZ

One of the best blues guitarists of his generation, stuck inside a career as a sensitive pop songwriter. Eighteen tracks of John Mayer's ongoing identity problem.

The player and the persona

John Mayer arrived in 2001 with Room for Squares and a hit about a woman's body being a wonderland, which set his public image for a decade. Underneath it was something else entirely: a guitarist good enough that B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Eric Clapton all sought him out, and who formed the John Mayer Trio explicitly to play blues.

He has also spent years being his own worst advocate. A pair of extraordinarily ill-judged magazine interviews in 2010 — including racist language he later apologised for at length — did lasting damage, and much of his subsequent work has been made in the shadow of it.

Since 2015 he has toured as a member of Dead & Company alongside surviving members of the Grateful Dead, which has turned out to suit him better than anything else he has done.

What to listen for

"Gravity" is the essential track. Slow, spare, and built around a guitar solo that says more than the lyric does — it is the clearest evidence of what he actually is.

"Stop This Train" and "The Heart of Life" are the best writing on the list, and "Daughters" won Song of the Year despite being the record his detractors point at.

"Waiting On the World to Change" is the political one, and it is a strange, oddly passive protest song that has aged interestingly.

"Clarity" is the most musically adventurous thing from his early period — built on a loop, with the great Steve Jordan on drums.

The collaborations tell the story. Alicia Keys' "Lesson Learned," Frank Ocean's "White" — a guitar instrumental on Channel Orange — and Eric Clapton's "Magnolia" are all invitations from people who wanted the player, not the persona.

"Last Train Home" and "New Light" are the later, poppier records, and "I Guess I Just Feel Like" is the closest he has come to addressing his own reputation directly.

Go deeper

Continuum (2006) is the album, and it is genuinely excellent — a blues-soul record disguised as a pop one, produced with Steve Jordan.

Try!, the John Mayer Trio live album with Jordan and bassist Pino Palladino, is the one for people who only want the guitar.

For the players he came from: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Robert Cray, Buddy Guy and, above all, Jimi Hendrix's ballad playing — "Gravity" is essentially a Hendrix idea worked out at half speed.

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