And if you never stop when you wave goodbye, you just might find if you give it time, you will wave hello again…
I was a man on a mission. I had about 20 minutes to myself in the local mall while my mom and sister went off to shop for something, and I knew I was going to need every one of them to accomplish my task.
Walking briskly, I dodged around families with young children and groups of lackadaisical teenagers, making my way across this crowded retail mecca to find my destination: FYE, with its rows and rows of pristinely shrink-wrapped CD and DVD cases. The album I was looking for had just dropped that week, so it was right there at the front of the shop, just waiting for me to pick it up off the shelf. Then, I made my way to one of the listening stations, where you could scan the barcode of the CD you were thinking about buying, put on a pair of communal over-the-ear headphones (in retrospect, eww!), and sample the tracks. A quick listen through various clips from the album confirmed that it had more to offer than the lead single I’d had stuck in my head for weeks. And so, convinced, I marched up to the checkout counter and handed the cashier $15 or so of my hard-earned cash. It was the first CD I’d ever bought with my own money.
The date was Sunday, September 14, 2003, and the album was Heavier Things, John Mayer’s sophomore follow-up to the 2001 smash Room for Squares. At most, I’ll say I’d been a casual fan of Squares: I liked most of the songs, but none of them had become obsessions in the year or two since my sister had gotten a copy of the CD for one of her birthdays. But “Bigger Than My Body,” the lead single from Heavier Things, had absolutely become an obsession since it had dropped on August 25. That song had a dynamite earworm chorus and some of the coolest guitarwork my 12-year-old ears had ever heard on a pop single, and I was tired of holding my breath and hoping I’d hear the on the radio or catch the video while flipping channels after school. I needed to be able to hear “Bigger Than My Body” whenever I wanted, and it led me to do something I’d never done before, but would do many, many, many times in the decades to follow; it led me to buy the album.
For the next two months, I listened to Heavier Things every single day when I got home from school. It was just part of the routine: get home, fire up my portable CD player, hear those opening piano strains of “Clarity,” and do my homework while the album played. I loved Heavier Things right away, but I came to develop an extremely meaningful bond with it over the course of that fall, as I listened over and over again. I was particularly taken with a pair of songs in the second half: “Split Screen Sadness” and “Wheel.” Both are ballads and both are songs about goodbyes – albeit, different kinds of goodbyes.
“Split Screen Sadness,” as you might surmise by the title, is a classic breakup song. “Wheel,” though, is more complex and more existential, a track about the many goodbyes you’ll say throughout your life, and about how, no matter how many times you say them, you never quite get used to it. More simply, “Wheel” is a song about the passage of time – about how, no matter what you do, the seasons will shift, and the leaves will fall, and people will go their separate ways, and everything will change. I don’t know how much I grasped all that in the moment: I was 12 years old, after all, and the saddest goodbyes I’d ever said were just the “See you later” farewells with grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins when we’d part ways at the end of a visit or a family reunion. But I loved the melancholy of this song, and the way it put Heavier Things to rest on such a beautiful note, with Mayer insisting that, by putting love out into the world, we might just get love back in return.
I learned so much – about music, and about myself – from listening to Heavier Things. It was, in a lot of ways, the album that taught me to love albums and how they’re constructed. An opening track that feels like a mission statement, and that does a terrific job at building anticipation for what’s to come; a hooky-as-hell lead single with a little more substance than meets the eye; some mid-tempo album tracks to keep things moving in the album’s mid-section; the reflective, late-album ballads that seem to hold the core kernels of wisdom for the project; the “one last banger” maneuver, where you tuck a killer upbeat track into the penultimate slot; and then, a perfect closer to serve up the emotional fireworks, the grand finale, the pretty little bow on the package.
Heavier Things isn’t even my favorite John Mayer album – that title belongs to its follow-up, the 2006 masterpiece Continuum – but it is, I think, a perfectly put-together album. The tight, 10-song, 46-minute runtime; the mix of tempos and moods and emotional colors; the superb pacing, and how it makes all the songs so much better when you hear them all in order. Maybe most importantly, it serves up a closing track so good that every album I heard subsequently had me waiting, with great anticipation, to find out whether that artist had also saved their best song for last.
After this, I wanted to buy every album out there. I was no longer satisfied with downloading radio singles off Limewire and making mix CDs. Suddenly, I was a believer in the power of a full-album statement, and if I liked a song from an artist, that meant I wanted to hear the album from which that song was drawn. From that point until I got a car and had to save my spending money for gas, I spent every dime I had on CDs. Not all of them changed my life like this one…but a lot of them did. And one of the joys of becoming an adult with expendable income is that I am once again buying albums like I did when I was 13 and 14. These days, it’s on vinyl instead of CD, but there’s still just about nothing I find as electrifying as walking into a record store with money burning a hole in my pocket and 30 minutes to kill.
I suppose it’s no surprise, given how important this album was to my musical and personal evolution, that the songs from it continue to come back around at different moments in my life, like the wheel described in the final track. Just last December, on the day my wife and I gave our beautiful foster kitty Riley up for adoption, “Wheel” came up on shuffle in the car and made me cry. By that point, I’d said a lot more goodbyes in my life than I had at 12: goodbyes to friends I lost touch with; goodbyes to pets who’d spent their lives with me; goodbyes to my grandparents as they departed this earth; goodbyes to places and things and entire eras of my life. Like I said earlier, those things never get easier. Goodbyes always hurt. Saying goodbye to Riley, even as we sent him off to his forever home for a happily ever after, hurt too. But as the song says in its final lines: “I believe that my life’s gonna see/The love I give return to me.”
It’s a good lesson: to love completely and boldly and beautifully, because you’ll get so much more in return than you’d ever get from holding back.