There's no such thing as failure for Mayer

By MIKE HOULAHAN

Two years of constant touring have been good for one thing, United States musician John Mayer says. His pool game has improved out of sight.

"Being a touring musician you can get at only a few things when you're touring, and one of them happens to be bar games," says Mayer, who returns to play a concert in Auckland this weekend after an earlier promotional tour.

"Bar games, card games, hand-to-hand combat ... "

It's been good for another thing though: he is now being hailed as a genuine overnight success story. Mayer's single No Such Thing has been a big hit, and has dragged his Room For Squares album on its coat tails.

"We've been touring straight for two years now, and if you'd told me four years ago that I was going to tour straight for about two years I'd have probably quit," Mayer laughs.

"That said, there was no Plan B. It was always music, and that's cool. I'm pretty proud of that, actually."

Mayer grew up in Connecticut and first picked up a guitar as a 13-year-old. After a few initial lessons he dedicated himself to figuring out how his guitar heroes - in particular Stevie Ray Vaughan - played their instruments.

"I wasn't into employing what I knew as a songwriter.

"I was very much into regurgitation at that age, which was great. I'd say, 'I want to play what he played exactly the way he played it', and give it a try."

Mayer didn't start writing his own songs until his last year at high school.

He then went to study at Boston's Berklee College of Music where, as Mayer puts it, the guitar-playing side of his brain found a way to get along with his brain's songwriting side.

Mayer says the other crucial moment in his brief college career was meeting Atlanta musician Clay Cook, who was so impressed he invited him to join a band back home in Georgia.

That band didn't work out, "which is sometimes the case with two musicians who decided their entire lives were going to revolve around being frontmen," Mayer says.

However, Atlanta was now home, as much through necessity as choice.

"I had to stick it out because I knew I had no more chances of telling my parents, 'I'm going to make a go of this, you've got to trust me'."

Mayer toned down the blues pyrotechnics he had laced his earlier songs with and, instead, concentrated on crafting a more restrained and at times highly introspective set of pop songs.

They were collected on a debut solo acoustic album Inside Wants Out.

His talents were soon spotted and, buoyed by the strong local support Mayer had found in Georgia, he decided to test the waters at the high-profile South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

The gamble paid off, with several major labels duelling for Mayer's signature.

Columbia won, and Mayer was soon ushered off to the studio to record with John Alagia, who has previously worked with the Dave Matthews Band.

As Mayer was still playing solo, he and Alagia had to build a band and a "Mayer sound" from the ground up. It was generally a rich and rewarding process, Mayer says. "He and I created the tone of the record together, so it wasn't like I had to give up much of what I wanted to do.

"Some of the songs are exactly as I imagined them, some of them are close, some of them I probably had the song for too long and lost the ball, in terms of what they should have been.

"For what the record is meant to be, which is catching the world up with what I have written, I think it's great.

"I'm really proud of it and don't listen to any moment of it and cringe.

"My next record will certainly be more real-time though, be what I've been thinking of for the past six months."

- NZPA

* John Mayer plays at the Regent, Auckland tomorrow night.