By Andy Argyrakis

"I can't accept being one of thirty people in a room, trading identity for curriculum," quips the youthful singer/songwriter John Mayer in reference to his one-year of studies at Boston's Berklee College of Music. "Don't get the wrong idea. I'm stating this as a flaw. I have too much of a bug in me that wants to be famous in a room of people. It shouldn't be that way, but it's actually inspiring to break out and write songs that I'd have no outlet to do through institutionalized learning."

After spending about a minute speaking with Mayer, it's clear he's no self-righteous spotlight hog but rather a make-no-excuses realist who merely says what's on his mind. And though reporting to professors day in and day out has been left in his past, Mayer still dabbles with institutionalized learning, in so many words. It's all part of the territory when signing to a major label. Like a professor suggesting a student rewrite a paper to earn a better grade, executives at Aware/Columbia coaxed Mayer into re-recording some of his previously independent material with additional flavor for his major label debut Room For Squares, released last fall. For Mayer, however, compromise is not always such a foul word.

"I hadn't completely closed the book on those songs because I knew I'd be coming back for some of them," says Mayer in reference to his independent material. "To me, it's much more than just recording your songs on a CD, or in my case singing those songs again and going through that process a second time. The real completion of a song is ongoing, starting from the writing process and regularly coming to conclusions during a live presentation."

On what college is really about: "It's like social boot camp for the rest of your life. You'll never live so close to so many people with so many different variables in each situation."

Onstage, Mayer is casual and seems more like a member of the audience than a well-traveled rock star in the making. He thrives on playing off a crowd and winning over new fans. His quirky lyrics mixed with a healthy division of acoustic and electric backdrops ensure freshness cut after cut. When it comes to singer/songwriter forefathers, Mayer admits he'd love to be thrown into the same sentence as label mates Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. ("I'm probably kidding myself for saying that but I would like to have that kind of longevity and that rhythmic pace of releasing records," he admits.) Stylistically Mayer combines hints of bluesy guitar sounds inspired by Stevie Ray Vaughan, gravely Marc Cohn-styled vocals, and several song subplots that bring the style of Ben Folds to mind. Then, of course, there is the underlying muse of Jeff Buckley, who Mayer credits as being his continual source of sustenance, despite realizing his material heads down a different path.

"His music is so heavy and emotional with lots of dark mystery to it," Mayer says. "But I've found my way of writing is just a lot brighter, not in an intelligence sense, but in the terms of being the opposite of melancholy."

Case in point is Mayer's tongue-in-cheek foreshadowing of his high school reunion during "No Such Thing." He jovially sings "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've got to rise above." Tracks like "City Love" and "Love Song for No One" run Mayer's emotional gamut from falling in love with a girl during a night out on the town to being all alone at home on a Friday night. Additional spacious imagery comes during the jangly "Your Body is a Wonderland" and the somber "St. Patrick's Day."

"'Your Body' is the most passionate in the one sense of the word but that depends how you refer to 'passionate,'" Mayer says. "In terms of a passionate relationship, 'Your Body' is the most descriptive, but a song a lot slower or a lot less descriptive can still be equally passionate in terms of how I pour myself into writing and performing it."

Maybe Mayer's passionate delicacy throughout the album is what makes his favorite track so hard to pinpoint.

"With every artist starting their career, listeners seem to champion one or two songs," Mayer says. "I'll always be the one to go against the grain and try to make an underdog song more popular in concert. When that one starts getting requested all the time at shows, I'll pick a new tune to get behind so that way I'm constantly making things interesting."

For Mayer, it's less about pulling into a venue, spending an hour on stage, and then collecting the merchandise money at the end of the evening. He'd rather drive into a city and make it his hometown for the night, with the audience joining him for the ride.

"Touring and playing a show every night is just like watching one of your favorite movies several times in a row but with different friends each time," he says. "I get to take it all in every night and see what they think is funny and what's not funny, see what touched them and what didn't, and talk about it with them at the end."

And in the end, Mayer simply wants to be known for his musical legacy, not any of the frills that might come with it.

"[The overall goal is] to have a steady pace of albums, a good robust catalogue of music, and a good reputation," he says. "Hopefully just a reputation for quality music."

By Andy Argyrakis

March 2002