THE HOUSE OF HORRORS

the right thing, taking the high road, and all of a sudden Star magazine says, “He’s a rat.” I can’t tell you it didn’t give me that much more bloodlust to do what people thought I couldn’t do. PLAYBOY: It sounds simple, but it’s not: Battle Studies is an album about love. MAYER: Sure. It’s an album about love in this day and age, and at my age, 32. PLAYBOY: What do you mean by “in this day and age”? There aren’t any references in the songs that would have been unclear 20 years ago. MAYER: I’m a self-soother. The Internet, DVR, Netflix, Twitter—all these things are moments in time throughout your day when you’re able to soothe yourself. We have an autonomy of comfort and pleasure. By the way, pornography? It’s a new synaptic pathway. You wake up in the morning, open a thumbnail page, and it leads to a Pandora’s box of visuals. There have probably been days when I saw 300 vaginas before I got out of bed. PLAYBOY: What’s your point about porn and relationships? MAYER: Internet pornography has absolutely changed my generation’s expectations. How could you be constantly synthesizing an orgasm based on dozens of shots? You’re looking for the one photo out of 100 you swear is going to be the one you finish to, and you still don’t finish. Twenty seconds ago you thought that photo was the hottest thing you ever saw, but you throw it back and continue your shot hunt and continue to make yourself late for work. How does that not affect the psychology of having a relationship with somebody? It’s got to. PLAYBOY: You seem very fond of pornography. MAYER: When I watch porn, if it’s not hot enough, I’ll make up backstories in my mind. My biggest dream is to write pornography. PLAYBOY: How did you become a self-soother? MAYER: I grew up in my own head. As soon as I lose that control, once I have to deal with someone else’s desires, I cut and run. I’m pretty culpable about being hard to live with. I have had a good run of imagining things into reality. I’ve got a huge streak of successes based on my own inventions. If you tell me I’m wrong or that I’m overthinking something, well, overthinking has given me everything in my career. I have a hard time not looking at anxiety disorder as being like an ATM. I can invent things really well. I mean, I have unbelievable orgasms alone. They’re always the best. They always end the way I want them to end. And I have such an ability to make believe, I can almost project something onto my wall, watch it and get off to it: sexually, musically, it doesn’t matter. When I meet somebody, I’m in a situation in which I can’t run it because another person is involved. That means letting someone else talk, not waiting for them to remind you of something interesting you had in mind. PLAYBOY: Masturbation for you is as good as sex? MAYER: Absolutely, because during sex, I’m just going to run a filmstrip. I’m still masturbating. That’s what you do when you’re 30, 31, 32. This is my problem now: Rather than meet somebody new, I would rather go home and replay the amazing experiences I’ve already had. PLAYBOY: You’d rather jerk off to an exgirlfriend than meet someone new? MAYER: Yeah. What that explains is that

I’m more comfortable in my imagination than I am in actual human discovery. The best days of my life are when I’ve dreamed about a sexual encounter with someone I’ve already been with. When that happens, I cannot lay off myself. PLAYBOY: There are some angry, accusatory songs on the record, but there are also self-critical songs. It goes through all the changing moods you have on the worst night of your life. MAYER: Yeah, Battle Studies is that feeling between 10 p.m. and two a.m. when you have this wild level of arousal and optimism. It’s about the things people do to each other during those hours. I have wasted four hours of my life refusing to masturbate and believing that somehow the phone would ring and I’d get a call from somebody I hadn’t talked to in years. PLAYBOY: The phone will ring and your life will change? MAYER: Yeah. It’s like looking for a fix. I’ll spend four hours not even putting anything into motion, just believing somehow it’s going to come my way. PLAYBOY: You talked before about being an underdog. What were you like at 16? MAYER: I wasn’t paying attention in school. I would come home and play guitar, playing for all the moments I had that day when I couldn’t feel alive. I visualized I was a superhero with an alter ego: “By day, a gawky, zit-faced 16-year-old boy.…” I would sleep with my guitar because I thought it would make me play better. I had a 100-disc CD player in the basement, and I would load it up with Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Kenny Burrell and Bill Evans and play CDs while I slept on the floor. Like somehow, by osmosis, the music was getting into me. It was the only way I could build enough armor to go back to school the next day. PLAYBOY: How many hours a day were you playing? MAYER: Three to four hours a day when I was in school, and in the summertime five to six hours a day. I wasn’t smoking cigarettes or drinking, and I wasn’t trying to hook up. I wasn’t going to parties. I remember being in my room when there was a party across town, sitting in my room and pretending I was at the party and playing for them. I remember saying to myself, If I have to sleep on a pool table every night on tour, I’ll do it. I always had that desire to be a rock star. PLAYBOY: Were you one of those smart kids who hated school? MAYER: I would act up and get sent to the dean’s office and talk to him as though I was an adult. “I’m not trying to upset anybody, sir. With all due respect to you and your staff, I’m just not supposed to be here. It’s quite difficult for me to sit in class, because I’m supposed to be a guitar player, sir.” I was very cocky. But from the outset, there was opposition. My parents were not the biggest fans, to put it diplomatically. I grew up saying, “You’ll see. I can’t explain it yet, but you’ll see.” Early in my career, when I was 19 or 20, I’d meet presidents of record companies and refuse to give them my demos. I’d say, “We’ll see each other again sometime.” PLAYBOY: That is really cocky. MAYER: It was incredibly cocky. I was so tempered in opposition that when the opposition went away, I started to look like a total asshole. When my first record came out, I was still saying, “You’ll see. Check out what I did. Eat it.” It gave me this reputation for being really arrogant. I probably should have stood on top of a roof and yelled, “Fuck you!” That “I’ll (continued on page 107)

Jessica simpson, for me, is a drug. and drugs aren’t good for you if you do lots of them. that girl is like crack cocaine to me.