We Can Work it Out

John Mayer made me reevaluate my life. Ok, that's a wee bit of an overstatement, but going to see him in concert at Walnut Creek this past Wednesday did make me think about how much I've been slacking on my guitar practice, and about a time in my life when John's music was my soul's song. More on that in a minute.

I got a call from JaySun Webb about a week before the show, asking me if I wanted to go with him. His sister and her friends are the type of girls that melt over that kind of thing and they needed a fourth person to get the discounted ticket price. I was hesitant, but in the end I sucked it up and decided to go. The past 3 summers I've thought about going to see him when he comes to Walnut Creek, but every time I've been working at Caswell. I guess I felt like I owed it to the "Nathan Sloan" of years past to go see him since I never could before.

My "fanliness" toward John Mayer is a strange animal. It constantly changes, like the tides. One month, I may think he is the most amazing musician on the face of the planet - the next I brush him off as an arrogant, albeit rightfully so as far as musicianship goes, prick who could use more than a little voice training. In high school, my friend Matt introduced me to "Heavier Things" and I really liked it. Then I grew slightly ashamed of it's regular rotation in my car stereo. I finally packed it into a thick cd case, which got thrown in the back seat and mostly forgotten over the next few years.

It wasn't until Continuum that I really went crazy for his music. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. I had just broken up with a girl, I was miserably lonely, and I had it stuck in my head that I should become a guitarist. Songs like "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room" and "Dreaming with a Broken Heart" quickly became my songs - so easily relatable to the girl problems in my own life. "Heart of life," "In Repair," and "I'm Going to Find Another You" became my anthems. There are two things that make an album great - the fact that it is well written and produced, and the perspective of the person listening to it. A lot of it is in how your emotions vibe with the emotions of the person who wrote it. In the case of Continuum and myself, every single song was good, and most were outstanding.

The style of John Mayer's playing was also a new inspiration to me. When I finally got an electric guitar, it was a Fender Stratocaster, and I'm not ashamed to say that it wouldn't have been had I not loved that album so much. I took guitar study seriously for the first time. In six months I went from playing nothing at all to reading simple music and playing songs that I heard on the radio. It kept rolling and rolling, finally ending when I did the ultimate, (although not the ultimate, ultimate) and learned how to somewhat play his song "Neon." If it were not for John Mayer and my broken heart, I would certainly not be a guitarist today.

What hit me at this concert was how I'd forgotten this debt. In the past year my interests have strayed to other bands and other activities outside of guitar playing. I've put down my six-stringer for days at the time in the interest of goofing off with friends, playing video games, and pursuing other hobbies, (of which, there is a new one every month). Thankfully I recently sold off my xbox to get a new all-tube Fender amp so that's one distraction down, anyway. Since going to this show and being reminded of that time in my life when the blues pulled me through, I took my Strat to a guitar shop last week and it is still there, being set up so that it's ready to play.