John Mayer, back under his own name after a decade playing Jerry Garcia’s parts

John Mayer

Photo: Thatcommonkid / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 16, 1977 Bridgeport, Connecticut, United States
Occupation	Singer-songwriter and guitarist
Known for	Get Hard, Vengeance, Travis Scott: Look Mom I Can Fly
Awards	7 Grammy · Songwriters Hall of Fame Hal David Starlight

For ten years the songs that drew John Mayer’s biggest crowds were written by someone else. Night after night with Dead & Company he stood roughly where Jerry Garcia used to stand, stretching out Althea and Scarlet Begonias for Deadheads who had arrived suspicious of the man behind Your Body Is a Wonderland. That band went quiet when Bob Weir died. What Mayer is building now, with his own label, his first solo single in five years and a residency that splits him into three different musicians every night, is a public answer to a question he has dodged for most of his career: which of those players is the real one.

The guitar arrived through a film. Mayer, born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in October 1977 and raised in nearby Fairfield by a high-school principal and an English teacher, wanted one after watching Michael J. Fox play Marty McFly in Back to the Future. His father rented him an instrument at 13, and a neighbour’s Stevie Ray Vaughan cassette did the rest, sending him backwards through Buddy Guy, B.B. King and Freddie King. A heart-rhythm scare put him in hospital for a weekend at 17; he has said the songwriter in him was born then, and he wrote his first lyrics the night he was discharged.

He lasted two semesters at Berklee College of Music before driving south to Atlanta with a friend, Clay Cook, to play coffee houses such as Eddie’s Attic. An independent EP, Inside Wants Out, reached Aware Records, and Room for Squares, first sold online and then reissued by Columbia, filled American radio with No Such Thing and Your Body Is a Wonderland. The second won him the Grammy for best male pop vocal performance in 2003, which he accepted by promising to “catch up”. Heavier Things went to number one on the Billboard 200 that year, and Daughters was named song of the year in 2005, an award Mayer later decided belonged to Alicia Keys’s If I Ain’t Got You, to the point of handing her the top half of the trophy.

The pop success made him restless. With the drummer Steve Jordan and the bassist Pino Palladino he formed the John Mayer Trio, released the live record Try! and then Continuum, which he produced with Jordan as a meeting point between blues and radio pop. A Columbia executive disliked it so much that Mayer has said he briefly thought about quitting music to study design. Instead Continuum took the Grammy for best pop vocal album, Waiting on the World to Change won another, and Gravity, a slow blues first cut with the trio, collected a rock vocal award of its own two years later. Battle Studies swung back towards pop in 2009, with Taylor Swift singing on Half of My Heart.

Then the talking nearly undid the playing. In two interviews published in February 2010, with Rolling Stone and Playboy, Mayer traded sexual details about former partners Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Aniston, used a racial slur, and described his dating life in terms that many readers heard as plainly racist. He apologised online and again, in tears, on stage in Nashville that night, then left New York and mostly stopped giving interviews. He later called the episode “a violent crash into being an adult”. It never fully left the record: critics who concede his guitar playing still list that Playboy interview next to the softness of his lyrics when they make the case against him, and no amount of virtuosity has made the two halves of that reputation cancel out.

Silence was then forced on him. A granuloma on his vocal cords needed surgery in 2011, and when it returned he cancelled the tour for Born and Raised, a record steeped in early-1970s Laurel Canyon that still entered the Billboard 200 at number one in May 2012. For months he could barely speak. He moved to Bozeman, Montana, played guitar behind Frank Ocean on Saturday Night Live and, by his own account, prepared himself for a future as a session musician. The voice came back in early 2013, and Paradise Valley, produced by Don Was, followed that August.

The Grateful Dead entered by accident. Mayer heard Althea on Pandora in 2011 and was soon listening to little else; in 2015 he played it with Weir on The Late Late Show, and that August Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann formed Dead & Company with him, Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti. The skepticism about a pop singer in Garcia’s role faded as the reviews came in, and the band toured for a decade, closing with 48 concerts across two residencies at the Sphere in Las Vegas in 2024 and 2025, and three nights in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in August 2025 for the Dead’s 60th anniversary, in front of an estimated 175,000 people. His own catalogue slowed meanwhile. The Search for Everything arrived in waves in 2017, and Sob Rock, a deliberate homage to 1980s soft rock down to its cover art, debuted at number two in 2021. The following March he announced he would not renew with Columbia after 21 years and eight studio albums.

Weir died in January 2026, aged 78, after a cancer diagnosis that had come weeks before those Golden Gate Park shows. Mayer’s first reaction was to step back. “Where I used to be on stage, I’m now in the crowd with everybody,” he told USA Today in August. A few days later, speaking to Andy Cohen on SiriusXM, he softened it: grieving meant hanging it up for now, but “I’m not swearing it off”. He has kept the songs close in another way, hosting a weekly Grateful Dead listening show on his own SiriusXM channel, Life with John Mayer.

His own name came back on 23 October. Tom and Jerry, his first single as a lead artist in five years, was written and produced with Blake Slatkin and recorded at Chaplin Studios, the old Charlie Chaplin and Jim Henson lot in Hollywood that Mayer bought with the director McG, with Palladino on bass, Aaron Sterling on drums, Lenny Castro on percussion and Larry Goldings on organ. It is the first release on Sob Rock Records, the label Mayer launched with Universal’s Mercury Records, and when he announced it he made a point of posting the full personnel list himself, telling fans it was important they knew who had played on it.

The real test is booked for Las Vegas. From 8 April to 12 June 2027 Mayer plays 21 nights at the Sphere under his own name, each split into a solo set, a full-band set and a trio set with Jordan and Palladino, the format of his 2017 tour, staged in the same room where he played 48 nights of the Grateful Dead’s songbook. One dollar from every ticket goes to his Back to You Fund. No new album has been announced. What is on sale is a chance to hear the crooner, the bandleader and the blues player in a single evening and decide which one Mayer meant all along.

Selected Discography

Room for Squares (2001)
Heavier Things (2003)
Continuum (2006)
Battle Studies (2009)
Born and Raised (2012)
Paradise Valley (2013)
The Search for Everything (2017)
Sob Rock (2021)

Tags: singers, John Mayer, Bob Weir, Continuum, Dead & Company, pop rock

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