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For John Mayer, singer, songwriter, and notorious blabbermouth, 2010 was a strange year. In interviews with Rolling Stone and Playboy, given six months apart, Mayer spewed the bile of his brain with unabashed frankness. There was no topic too weird or too personal for Mayer to bring up, unprompted. From wild comments on masturbation, his desperate and failing pursuit for a partner, and distorted sense of self, it seemed that celebrity status had twisted Mayer irrevocably.
Mayer was 32 at the time of those interviews, and has spent much of the past eight years trying to undo their damage. Now, at 40, he’s conscious of the way those interviews’ legacies lived on: “The elephant in the room is that we’re sort of talking about the double-headed dragon of the Rolling Stone interview and the Playboy interview,” he told a New York Times reporter in an interview released today.
So, on the occasion of his status as a calmer 40-year-old, let’s remember what the manic 32-year-old once said to Playboy. Imagining a conversation with his future self, Mayer said, “I sometimes I meet the 40-year-old me and say, 'What do I do?' And 40-year-old me says, 'Don’t do every scheduled interview. Go to the zoo instead. You’re going to be fine, you knucklehead. Stop overthinking what people say.'"
But lest you forget: here are the most bonkers, offensive, ridiculous, hard-to-believe things that John Mayer actually uttered in those fateful interviews, and beyond. Prepare to have your mind blown.
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