Sony
Blues Rock, 2001

I have a confession to make. I love Your Body Is a Wonderland. I think it’s the sexiest song to describe the act of a sordid one-afternoon wham-bang. “I love the shape you take when crawling towards the pillowcase” must be the best line about autoerotic pillowcase asphyxiation ever. “I’ll never let your head hit the bed, without my hand behind it”? Ooh, I melt inside. How can any woman resist John Mayer’s invitation to swim “in a deep sea of blankets”? Is he talking about out-of-body experiences during sex with the lines “You tell me where to go and, though I might leave to find it”?

I love this song. John Mayer’s eyes creep me out but that song is the best knees-so-weak-I-want-to-bed-this-troll-like-dude anthem ever for fantasies of making it in motel rooms with creepy psychos who croon, “I know you are mine, all mine, all mine, but you look so good, it hurts sometimes”.

But once the lust has been slaked, it turns out that Mr Mayer here doesn’t have much to keep me engaged once the pillowcase crawling is done. Sounding like a younger Dave Matthews (I personally find Dave Matthews grating on my nerves if listened to at high dosage), playing the guitar very well I admit, his songs are nonetheless as deep as a puddle. Have you ever listened to a man drone on and on and on about the superficial angst of his life? John Mayer whines about high school angst in No Such Thing and 83. He talks about his bad date on My Stupid Mouth – and we all know it’s faux pas to talk about bad dates on bad dates. He wails “Am I living it right?” again and again in Why Georgia and how lonely he is in Love Song for No One, in the latter saying that he prefers to hide in his bedroom and “writes his love songs” – yeah right – until he meets Ms Right.

By the time he gets to telling me he loves me in City Love (“I never liked this apple much, it always seemed too big to touch, I can’t remember how I found, my way before she came around”), I’m so bored out of my wits with this man’s self-absorbed “me, me, me” tittle-tattles that I just have to kick him out of our dirty, stained motel bed. Sure, he has some great hooks here, blending jazz and blues and rock elements into one smooth late-night martini and smoke affair, but that guy is so shallow…