What the hell, John?
Let’s journey back for a moment to New Year’s Day, when John Mayer told the world via his Instagram account that his new album, The Search for Everything, would be coming in four-song waves “every month.” Mayer never explicitly said that he would be releasing 48 songs in 2017, but he definitely implied it. Strongly.
What he actually did was release two four-song waves—in January and February, respectively—and then announce a full-length album that would include all those songs, plus a few more. At this point, no one is sure whether Mayer will be continuing with the waves for the rest of the year or not. I don’t think Mayer even knows. On the one hand, CD versions of the new album label it “Vol. 1.” On the other hand, Mayer tweeted on release day: “And that ends an era: August ’14-April ’17.” Since The Search for Everything is an album about Mayer’s breakup with Katy Perry, and since the album is very much a “complete thought” on its own, there seems to be little reason that Mayer would continue this release cycle in any fashion.
The botched, contradictory rollout for The Search for Everything is bound to become the narrative of Mayer’s seventh full-length. That’s a shame, because there are a lot of things about Search that are very poignant and moving. As a breakup album, it’s less unique than 2009’s Battle Studies, which ping-ponged back and forth between dark, late-night loneliness and songs that found the beauty in being alone. Everything is more of a standard issue post-relationship album, following a narrative of a guy getting over a girl he used to love. There aren’t many surprises, either in the story or in the songs, but Mayer is still a more thoughtful observer of the human condition than most of his contemporaries, and that fact shows in set highlights like the wry, Timberlake-esque “Still Feel Like Your Man” (“I still keep your shampoo in my shower/In case you want to wash your hair/And I know you probably found yourself some more somewhere/But I do not really care/’Cause as long as it is there/I still feel like your man”) or the shattering “Never on the Day You Leave” (“It’s never on the day you leave/You can tell how it’s gonna be/To watch a girl become a ghost before your eyes”).
Despite his reputation as a cocky asshole, Mayer has always been good at getting vulnerable. “Stop This Train,” from 2006’s Continuum, is one of the best songs ever written about getting older and watching your parents age. The best songs on The Search for Everything are similarly insightful. “Never on the Day You Leave” is about how regret creeps in weeks or months after a relationship ends, as you realize all the little things you miss about that person. Mayer has called it “the saddest song I ever wrote.” It’s got competition for that title from “In the Blood,” which is also easily the best song on the record. A rumination on Mayer’s parents and their divorce, “In the Blood” asks questions with no easy answers—about a family torn apart and about how much of your parents’ flaws and mistakes are hardcoded into your DNA. “How much like my father am I destined to become?/Will I dim the lights inside me just to satisfy someone?/Will I let this woman kill me, or do away with jealous love?/Will it wash out in the water, or is it always in the blood?”
These highlights are easily more engaging and challenging than anything on 2013’s Paradise Valley, Mayer’s last record and still his most lightweight. But The Search for Everything can’t reach the heights of Mayer’s best albums, both because the release strategy has made it feel weirdly disjointed and because the sequencing does the songs no favors. Originally, when The Search for Everything was going to be 12 four-song EPs, it sounded like the perfect opportunity for Mayer to indulge all his different stylistic whims: blues, pop, soul, folk, country, and rock. Across the first two waves, that’s exactly what he did. Songs like “Moving on and Getting Over” sounded like they could have been on Continuum, while others, like the rootsy “Roll it on Home,” hewed closer to the Born & Raised/Paradise Valley era. Pulled together onto the same album, these songs are united by theme, but don’t jell together sonically.
The sequencing is also a mess. Mayer picks the right opener (“Still Feel Like Your Man”) and the right closer (“You’re Gonna Live Forever in Me,” a resigned piano ballad in the vein of Randy Newman), but everything that happens in between feels like a random jumble. The downbeat “Emoji of a Wave,” a serene number that wouldn’t be out of place on a Jack Johnson record, is pushed into the album’s number two slot, killing any momentum established by the shapeshifting, tongue-in-cheek opener. The emotional wallop of “In the Blood,” meanwhile, is immediately lessened by the next song, “Changing,” a lyrically basic track that should have been left as a b-side. And the album’s second half opens with “Theme from ‘The Search for Everything,’” a pleasant but superfluous instrumental. It’s telling that the record actually plays better on shuffle than in the sequence Mayer chose.
Despite its flaws, though The Search for Everything is a welcome return for one of the finest musicians and sharpest pop songwriters of the last 20 years. The album is ultimately more a summary of everything Mayer has done so far than a distinct new direction for him, but that’s okay. The chiming pop of “Love on the Weekend” calls back to Heavier Things and Battle Studies; “Roll it on Home” and “Emoji” would have been right at home on Paradise Valley; and roughly half the songs, from the soulful plea of “Rosie” to the sublime, Rumours-esque “Helpless,” see John returning to the fertile ground that brought us Continuum more than a decade ago. I’d like to have a more adventurous LP next time around, but for now, this one sounds pretty good to me.