John Mayer has a new interview with Best Life Magazine, in which the 30 year-old singer goes on and on about his thoughts on life and fame, to the point that the author calls him a blowhard several times in the article. For as much as Mayer talks at exhaustive length and about how he’s immune to criticism while focusing on how it bothers him, there is one subject he won’t discuss – his childhood.

At first Mayer says that he thinks about the positive attributes of his future wife “all the time.” He revealed that he’s looking for a “yes” woman who won’t give him any shit or ask for much attention or understanding in return. Maybe he’s asking for a gorgeous woman who’s not a drama queen and who is mellow, but I just don’t like him and can’t help but think he wants a robot barbie.

John Mayer on his future wife

“I think about my wife all the time,” says Mayer. “I kind of obsess on it, and what I want to find is a person who can speak those kinds of magic words. I mean ‘No complaints’ is a great way to live. Also, I want a woman who doesn’t hear ‘How are you?’ as ‘I would like you to come up with something dramatic now that will allow me to sit in front of you and give you more attention than I would have if you had just said ‘No complaints.’ When I find the person I can relate to on that level and who is also a pinup and who also says ‘Can I please take pictures of your ass?’ then I am going to get married to her. That I can promise you.”

[From Best Life Online]

Mayer revealed that he’s worried, though, that his bad reputation, twisted and embellished by the tabloids, will precede him and keep him from landing that sweet perfect woman who will never ask him to deal with any shit whatsoever:

John Mayer on not being able to land his soul mate due to the tabloids

“My fear,” he says, “is that I go up to the girl of my dreams and say, ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to say hello to you,’ and she slides the stool back and gets up and walks away, saying, ‘Not for me, Bub. I don’t want anything to do with you.’ And she says that because of something in my past. I mean, I know how to be a celebrity. I know how to be a guy on the street. I know how to roll with the punches. I know how to do the whole thing. And my past is actually pretty sterling. But when I think about my wife, I worry. I worry about what she thinks when she reads about me in US Weekly. It’s all vapor, nothing, ether. But I worry about it. I worry about what she thinks.”

Mayer said that his personal life is not who he dates or what he does, but that it’s “what happens in my heart and my head.” and adds that “nobody knows what’s going on in my head.” From the length and content of this interview, I would beg to differ.

Interviewer wishes Mayer would shut up
The author is not kind in his assessment of Mayer, and gives the same criticism of his overlong interview that I’ve given of his writing, calling him “a great big overstuffed load of verbiage.” Mayer admits “I’ve always been verbose,” to which the author writes “with that admission, you’d think he might slow down a little. But then off he goes again, full-steam ahead.”

John then talks about how the media circus over his relationship with Jessica Simpson gave him headaches and describes it as this horrible experience.

John talks about Jessica Simpson media circus

“Let me bring you into the mind-set now,” he says. “When you take two people who are trying to get together and relate, that’s already kind of a cluster f–k. But then, with us, there was this whole looming threat. And at a certain point, I got so many tension headaches just from magazine covers. Real tension headaches, from the mention of my name with someone else’s name and how people felt about that. Literal physiological responses where I was like, Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I thought to myself, Are you sure you want to do this? And what I said to myself was, You know what? There are times in your life when there is nobody to confer with but yourself. And you know what? This is my life, and this is a person I want to spend more time with, and I’m not going to let that other vapor get in the way. And I’ll defend that decision till the end.” He pauses, then marches on. “I also want to say about Jessica that I don’t want to talk about her or my experience with her as a dark cloud or something tumorous or cancerous. That’s all perception. It was very comfortable and very soothing. I never went, Gee, I sure would like two or three days away from this.”

Interviewer wishes he would shut up again

It’s interesting the way he spills this last bunch of words. No one here has mentioned cancer or tumors, nothing even close. On the contrary, his time with Simpson seems to have been good for him. But up come these ugly thoughts and images, ushered forth for no apparent reason. It’s as if he doesn’t know when to put a sock in it, and you have to wonder where it comes from, that uncontrollable urge to talk, come hell or high water.

The rest of the interview is more of Mayer masturbating with words, telling us he keeps things private while exposing his every half-baked thought.

When asked about his childhood in tony Fairfield, Connecticut, he doesn’t say much, except that “I think it’s for me in my life a really good idea to close off certain parts of my past.” The author reveals that Mayer’s parents were so concerned about the way he shut out the world in favor of mastering his guitar that they brought him to two psychologists. It’s probably a good thing for Mayer’s career that they couldn’t convince him to give it up, but he could surely benefit from some therapy.

Then Mayer gets to the crux of the matter – that he was still scared of the world when he made it big and that it wasn’t until his relationship with Jessica Simpson that he really decided to get out there. He said he suffered from terrible acne up until a few years ago and that affected his self esteem. It wasn’t until he dealt with everything that went along with dating a celebrity that he realized he had it in him to be one.

Mayer on going from being afraid to talking too much to the press

“I’d been a famous touring musician who had also been a shut-in for a really long time, which was weird,” he says. “But I’d had it really, really good. I had hit song, hit song, hit song. ‘Did you hear about this kid?’ And I’m like, Look at my respect. Look how credible my artistry is. I’m really perfect. I’m really doing it. It’s aces. And you get addicted to cultivating that thing and making it perfect. I’m telling you, man, I’m not f–king with you. But it stopped being perfect the day I said to myself, Wow, my heart is involved in this. The one thing I’d never been in my life is a person without a guitar. I used to be really frightened that if I stopped, it would leave me. But I had to evolve. If I wanted to see Jessica more, I had to grow up. And that’s the day that I grew up. A lot of people say it’s the day I grew down. Too bad. It’s the day I grew up.”

And here’s the part that everyone is quoting today – Mayer said he still suffers from anxiety and keeps Xanax in his pocket at all times. If you got this far, congratulations. I had a hard time reading that whole damn interview and this is my job.

Mayer says he takes Xanax for anxiety

In his early twenties, however, some­thing shifted inside that private little self-created world of his. He won’t say exactly what happened, only that on one specific day, he realized that “you can create dark neighborhoods in your mind as easily as you can create rural wonderlands. And the day I realized that was one of the worst days of my life. It sent me on quite a spin. I went on a bender. An anxiety bender.” Which is why he keeps Xanax in his pocket even now: “Because there are these incidental kinds of loopholes in my brain, where the wires can cross for a second and the hard drive crashes.”

It sounds like Mayer just decided one day to let all those racing thoughts out and that’s why his blog posts and interviews come across as a stream of consciousness. He’s using the press as a therapist, and I guess it’s better than being a shut-in. Maybe he should figure out a way to get out more while not letting everyone be privy to all his conflicting thoughts about life and fame. He doesn’t seem like as much of a dick to me after reading this, he’s certainly self-absorbed and self-important, but it comes off like more of defense mechanism. He really needs to figure things out in his life. Mayer seems to be doing ok compared to a lot of celebrities, but maybe he should learn to parse what comes out of his mouth and save all the soul-searching for his therapist’s couch.

Thanks to Best Life Online for these pictures and the quoted parts of the interview.