Traveling through Mississippi on his way to a performance at the New Orleans House of Blues, John Mayer remembers a conversation he had backstage with Jakob Dylan after opening for the Wallflowers. "He said, 'You know-you're young, handsome and you've got good songs-what does the record company even have to do?'" The irony of the exchange didn't befall Mayer. "As you know, he's no guttersnipe himself," Mayer notes. While 23-year-old Mayer has all the components for widespread stardom, he's not intent on taking the easy route to success. After a brief stint at the Berklee College of Music in 1997, Mayer moved to Atlanta to pursue a career in music. For the past few years he's been honing his alt/pop/acoustic rock sound to ever-growing crowds, and released an independent album, Inside Wants Out, in 1999 ("It was real indie. It was no-bar-code indie"). On Sept. 11, Room for Squares, which was released briefly on Aware, will be rereleased on Columbia with remixed tracks and a new song, "3x5." "This is the real fulfillment of what Room for Squares should be," describes Mayer.

While his brand of singer/songwriter music is not part of the current musical norm, Mayer is optimistic that a change will turn the public's attention away from mainstream pop. "I think there's room for everything. I just wonder if its prominence and its seemingly all-enveloping shadow on other types of music is a little dangerous for the progress of music as a whole." He notes, "I think people are starting to want to hear tunes now, because people have taken the turd-polishing for as far as it can go."

For now, listeners can direct their ears to his first single, "No Such Thing," a song Mayer co-wrote about his future 10-year high school reunion. "What I want to do [with the song] is make all those people who were my age at the time, who might possibly want to go into something that they have incredible passion for, and make them actually do it instead of trading that in for what they think is the sensible thing. Because there is no sensible thing anymore and I'm not sure if there ever was."