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Room for him
There’s not much that’s bigger than John Mayer
BY SEAN RICHARDSON

"I’m bigger than my body gives me credit for," sings pop wunderkind John Mayer on his current hit, "Bigger Than My Body." There’s no shortage of irony in that line, since a recent Rolling Stone feature on the six-foot-three, 26-year-old pin-up included a sidebar recognizing him as one of the tallest men in music. So when it turns out he’s actually talking about his body of work, the song makes a lot more sense. "I’ll gladly go down in a flame/If a flame’s what it takes to remember my name," he elaborates near the end of the track. He doesn’t need to worry about going down just yet — with its quirky keyboard hook, driving rock groove, and swooning chorus, "Bigger Than My Body" is another triumph.

Since the 2001 release of his first album, Room for Squares (Columbia), Mayer has endeared himself to fans of Dave Matthews and Justin Timberlake alike. That multi-platinum disc’s big singles — the playful anti-conformity rant "No Such Thing," the white-bread sex jam "Your Body Is a Wonderland," the angst-ridden query "Why Georgia" — helped make radio a friendlier place. The most distinctive of the three, "Your Body Is a Wonderland," spawned a steamy video (picture an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue come to life) and won Mayer a Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. The Connecticut native and Berklee College of Music dropout has proved especially popular in New England, as his recent victories at the Boston Music Awards and in the Boston Phoenix/FIX Best Music Poll attest.

"Bigger Than My Body" is the first single from Mayer’s new Heavier Things (Columbia), which debuted at #1 on the Billboard albums chart in September and has since gone platinum. Once again, he does almost all the singing, guitar playing, and writing; once again, he sounds a lot like Dave Matthews at his most commercial. For the first time, he teams up with veteran producer Jack Joseph Puig (Black Crowes, Tonic), a man who knows a thing or two about roots pop. Faced with high expectations, Mayer and Puig have delivered a disc that sounds both modern and warm — and seems poised to unleash one soft-rock smash after another.

Mayer spends much of Heavier Things coming to terms with his new-found success, a hackneyed topic that floats on his buoyant melodies. "And I will wait to find/If this will last forever," he sings on the opening "Clarity" before conceding that it won’t. That doesn’t keep him from getting funky with the album’s two biggest guest stars, drummer ?uestlove from the Roots and jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove. On "Something’s Missing," he starts to get a little glum: "Something’s missing/And I don’t know what it is." But the guitars chime in agreeably, and he sounds thankful enough for the things he does have (friends and money, for starters) when he enumerates them at the end of the song.

There’s nothing as seductive as "Your Body Is a Wonderland" here, but Mayer still writes plenty of songs for the ladies. On the tasty slow blues "Come Back to Bed," he’s more smart-ass than lover boy: "You can be mad in the morning/I’ll take back what I said." He gets his act together on "Daughters," a jazz-inflected ballad that pledges his love to all the women in the world with little more than voice and acoustic guitar. The closing "Wheel" is the disc’s most bittersweet romance: "And I won’t be the last/No I won’t be the last/To love her," he sighs, tender guitars weeping behind him as he waves goodbye to a friend.

"Wheel" was the last song Mayer played before the encore on November 24 at Madison Square Garden in New York City — his first gig at the biggest concert venue in his current adopted home town. The crowd was very young, very female, and very loud — in other words, more Justin Timberlake than Dave Matthews. On stage, he took plenty of time to indulge his life-long obsession with blues-rock guitar great Steve Ray Vaughan, which he always brings up in interviews but rarely puts across on disc. "Come Back to Bed" turned into a lengthy instrumental jam session; his musicianship also shone on the Room for Squares nugget "Back to You."

The band, anchored by bassist David Larruper and drummer J.J. Johnson, were content to stay in the background and keep the coffeehouse funk airtight. Mayer uses session players on most of Heavier Things, but his touring outfit gets the call on the exuberant "Only Heart," one of the album’s highlights. "You got my only heart," he coos, his voice striving for new blue-eyed-soul heights with every beat. He may not always have a lot to say, but he sure knows how to say it.


Issue Date: December 12 - 18, 2003
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