John Mayer, 'Recovered Ego Addict' | msnbc

john mayer is a seven-time Grammy winner a multi-platinum selling artist and a prodigious guitarist who's played with everyone from Eric Clapton to Ed Sheeran but in recent years you might know him better for making headlines than for making music from tabloid ready falls in and out of love with famous women to a notorious tell-all Playboy interview then he disappeared from the spotlight avoiding social media at interviews and building a quieter life in Montana I caught up with him in LA as he works on a new deeply personal album and tries to put the focus back on his very first love when I discovered the guitar when I was 13 all of the creative energy went into that so I was sitting in class writing lyrics I was in math class on in one of those uneven desks writing lyrics one story that's out there is that Back to the Future was the genesis of the guitar idea that was the big rocky moment for a lot of kids who were into music and that for me was like the moment the nerd gets revenge right like who is this nerdy Marty McFly kid and then he gets to play basically blowing people's love people's minds which is a child fantasy being the quiet kid in the room while the son plugs in plays we're even outsider that's a good question I had created this alter ego which was by day this sort of mild-mannered kid who nobody really saw and then by night I would be in a room listening to Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and Freddie King and and Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and I was playing along with CDs and then I went to school and it's very difficult but then you ultimately got to do that you pursued that as an adult it happened really fast for me really really fast by 2000 I signed my record deal 2001 record came out four squares yeah yeah bodies Wonderland is everywhere yeah radio loves you runaway or transformed yeah what's that experience like it's just a rocket ride were you ready for it yeah I was ready for everything that happened was it made perfect sense to a guy like me if you'd asked somebody from Fairfield Connecticut what do you thinks gonna happen to John's ego oh yeah yeah absolutely he was going to hit it so hard that at first people are gonna go great job and he was never gonna stop until he went off the rails Kinki went off the rails though he used in my way based on based on what my payload was I didn't have a drinking problem I wasn't it was a thinking man's it was a thinking man's fiasco right it was like it's a lot harder to explain to somebody when you're 23 and you begin your life at the top of the chart and you've got that spunk and you go bring on the world and there you go okay here's a Grammy and here's an audience and you got it now when you invariably do find out that not everything you touch turns to gold you've got a choice you either bleed out or you tie off right so what's the point at which you tie it off I tie it off after I went alright dude you did you did a couple interviews where where you were out of touch and you were baby in a ham and you were basically breakdancing into a night nitroglycerin plant right now you don't even have the chance that everybody's gonna love you ever again they handed me that Playboy interview before it came out and I knew out I knew that I knew you could have sat down if I may said John that's not getting printed but I wanted you to know what would have happened had I not stopped that interview but do you think they shouldn't have printed that no I do think they should have printed it you just think there's a place for that moment of Mercy well you give it to yourself you give it to yourself you know you got to give it to yourself but you know in that period of time I would have rather killed myself than been killed I was never gonna wrap my Corvette around a tree I was my my high speed crash was an intellectual one what was the moment where you first thought okay this is not what I want to be known for oh man the first time somebody misunderstands you and says you're a womanizer you don't consider yourself a womanizer no no absolutely not but when you're crafty and you're clever and you go well I'm just going to be as strange as they think I am so okay now you're on TMZ and you're playing into the role you're leaning into the role right you stand then you lose number one you're not playing music anymore number two you're not feeling anything honestly and number three you're not saying anything honestly you once said you abuse the ability to express yourself oh yeah what's different now oh I know what I want I don't care if this video gets 500,000 views or 50,000 views or 5,000 views I'm not out to affect that anymore that's for me to care that's for you to care about Matt are you susceptible yourself to wanting the Twitter feed back yeah yeah that's why I pulled myself off of it again I'm a recovered ego addict and the only way that I can that I can be sure that I don't relapse is to admit that I constantly have this ego addiction every day so I do the Grammys and I go home because if I stayed I'd get high again and then and then I'd get high and then I'd get low high on the approval yeah well yeah you've already looked through Twitter everybody goes it's great and then you're low again because you can't stop looking or you get you get low because you read the one negative thing so I'm a recovered ego addict like this is not the first outfit I put on today I'm admitting that because that's my AAA for being an egomaniac are you gonna check Twitter after this interview I will not check Twitter but I checked the mirror the original Twitter the mirror I checked my mentions in the glass how has this changed since you broke there's new technology instant feedback now right the technology that I think I'm I'm confident enough to say is hurting music is that musicians are are very self conscious now they're very self-aware I see people sing and I go they're hoping they do okay and they're gonna find out if they do okay they're looking for the feedback they're obscene whilst judging they're performing for the Twitter mentions they're just hoping that that when they get in the car on the way to dinner they're gonna their faces lit up and they're checking to see if they did okay I could go on a sermon if I wanted to but I just don't know how old fart it would sound I just don't want to call BS on things that aren't for me you have two choices you can look at Sam Smith and you can say you can be all cynical and go well I knew Sam Smith when it was that you go yeah but they don't are you implying that Sam Smith is Traynor wheels for people who haven't Rebecca no I don't I mean it but it but if you wanted to be cynical you could listen to it and go oh I've heard that when it was X Y & Z or something and I'm kind of picking the guy out of a hat because I like Samson and I would use Sam Smith as an example for so many great things I go oh they're doing that again like that's been done but you go later don't hold your age against other people you know what I mean because it's the first time they've ever gone to it and I think oh I don't ever heard someone sing like that you go have it I want you to have it you think it's getting worse there's nobody to tell you what to do anymore artists overthrew the record company heads and the record company heads cannot tell an artist when to put a single up on their own way I know on their you know they put a clip of your salad it's the gray house SoundCloud and they can say whatever they want can say what they want anytime they want there's no checks and balances and house technology changing that when you look at say Taylor Swift coming out and saying and I'm talking about Taylor Swift professional air you have to be able to talk about Taylor's we have to be able to talk about so tell me about that when she comes out and says I'm not putting it on Spotify right that doesn't respect the the artists and the writers enough I think that's cool I think that's really cool uh artists need the person with the loudest voice to speak for them and is she doing that I think so when you say that we can go to the Met Ball you know that's great that's a great way to use your voices go I'm wearing Valentino or you can use your voice to give things well now some people the cynical could say you're helping yourself but it's trickled down you're not saying I want this just for me I think that's a really cool thing for a musician to do like there's only like like two percent of the music industry has 80 percent of all the media about it you know what I mean there's like four people in the middle oppressed who get all the press and if any of those four people say I want to speak for the other people who just would never make this a story the only reason that we're talking about Taylor Swift taking Spotify on is because she's Taylor Swift and that's great you said you could do that or you could go to the Met Gala yeah does it bother you when you look at her or anyone else we're talking about in this conversation and there they've got that side of their public oh not at all not at all nothing bothers me anymore man do you still have that emotional reaction though yeah Taylor Swift one of those four people uh-oh check myself with it but yeah yeah I have a field there gonna be times when I make music is as popular or empirically empirically valuable as that in terms of be making pop music that that won't make sell as many copies and I'm fine with that you can't you get to an age you go look if I save a baby from a burning building and Kanye self saves a baby from a burning building there's more Google News hits on Kanye I'm fine with it you and Kanye saving babies from building now together this is what I'm trying to tell you is together we're on stop but that's a great episode as a new er right there but it all we're talking about is like being honest with yourself and what to ask for in this life I put out a song called paper doll the song never got listened to as a song it became a news story because of the lyrics but you must have known that that's what it was going to become when you read it I'm not in the business of telling people what the songs about I don't I never said anything about it but and now I just go look I can say the name Taylor Swift she's an artist I'm an artist let's just everybody stop nobody's got a incurable cancer we're rich people who get to live out our dreams let's just stop it I'm a musician who's bigger than one song or one record so it's really more about the longevity of all the work that goes together and I'm just not interested in the things that won't last forever what have you found in Montana I just found home mana and it gives you outside perspective I'm gonna have one wife a certain number of children friends that are set fans that will that will listen to the music that I make and the greatest moment for me was giving up the big fight the big fight to be this thing that gets off the airplane at LAX and floats through and I have a lot I have a lot of admiration and like envy sometimes for people that large you know I'll be standing by the front desk sometimes being like you know anyone want to notice anybody won't notice me you know but in the idea their party that still wants to be one direction oh that's such a good question sure but it wants to be one direction via Neil Young if you could say one thing to young John Mayer say right before room for squares what's that message that's give my hog I guess now there's nothing you can tell that kid there's nothing you could tell that kid and give him a hug and then I'd go in this guy's I'd say that guy's really really talented but I don't want to be anywhere near and when that thing goes off this is what I would tell my young self you are now my young self what a handsome young me you are I'm trying there was never a shot there was never a shot of doing this perfectly it was never in the cards that's what I write people I wrote I don't wanna bring her into the conversation I wrote this new up-and-coming Australian rapper I don't want to give her name away because there's so many of them so actually this is it I said don't be upset that you're feeling like you're just an inch away from having your cake here this is the new way it's going to be they were never going to do it seamlessly success comes with hatred now yeah it just comes with yeah that's how we learn about things now I write hey I'm John I just want to let you know that this feeling you're having that you become successful but the world won't stop hating on you this is not a broken version of success this is the new version of success so we're doing this series on genius and I promised you I would not put you in the position of describing I through this interview I am NOT a genius there's this other side you get to and you don't get there very often call it this other side where while you're writing you speak so much of your truth that you're even learning from it John Mayer it's like it's like a therapy session every time I talk to you thank you man for who is that and now it's America's therapy session now it's America three hundred and twenty five dollars doesn't cover it

Channel: MSNBC

Views: 3,398,548

Rating: 4.8047614 out of 5

Keywords: MSNBC, news channel, news station, newspaper, breaking news, us news, world news, politics, current events, top stories, pop culture, business, health, liberal, progressive, cable, cable news, john mayer inteview, Iggy Azalea (Celebrity), Taylor Swift (Celebrity), ronan farrow, John Mayer (Celebrity), john mayer song, john mayer music, Back To The Future (Award-Winning Work), sam smith

Id: vnul38p3HVY

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2015