And even at its most robust, “Sob Rock” is placid, never doing more than winking.īut then, the album is merely a pretense for Mayer. But in general, Mayer’s songwriting is resistant to even the most thorough gussying up. In places, like “Carry Me Away,” the triumph of the arrangement is potent enough to cloak the brittle lyrical bones it sits upon. (Palladino also played on Don Henley’s 1989 solo pop breakthrough “The End of the Innocence,” a clear touchstone here.) That extends to the behind-the scenes players, who include Greg Phillinganes, who played with Michael Jackson, Anita Baker, Richard Marx and many more the highly regarded session drummer Lenny Castro and the bassist Pino Palladino, known for work with D’Angelo and Elton John.
#John mayer where the light is online full#
“Sob Rock” - produced by Mayer with Don Was, a stalwart of ’80s and ’90s adult rock who’s worked with Bonnie Raitt, Bob Dylan and more - is full of throwback musical nuggets (“Last Train Home,” “Wild Blue”) designed to trigger old pleasure centers.
![john mayer where the light is online john mayer where the light is online](https://www.martinguitar.com/on/demandware.static/-/Sites-martin-master-catalog/default/dw7cec7798/images/OMJM-John-Mayer/OMJM-John-Mayer_f.jpg)
There’s a saccharine twinkle running throughout “New Light,” and the end of “I Guess I Just Feel Like” is thick with appealingly dusty guitar. Where “Sob Rock” comes alive, as it were, is on the song outros, which nod to the sort of musicianship that has made Mayer a cognoscenti favorite and a seamless inclusion to Dead & Company, his primary musical outlet of the last half decade. The conceit of “Sob Rock,” Mayer’s eighth studio album, offers an opportunity for, if not a contemporary context, at least a context. They suggest notionally angsty rock to listen to in your imported German convertible.Īs retro costume choices go, it is an apt one for Mayer, who in the last decade has largely been musically at sea as the blues-pop of his younger years has drifted with no anchor in the Drake era. These are detailed signifiers, an advertisement for a familiar kind of casually louche rock excess - not the rowdiness of hair metal or the maximalism of prog, but the slick unctuousness that heralded the arrival of the yuppie.
![john mayer where the light is online john mayer where the light is online](https://pictures.depop.com/b0/5021677/441902614_v4QJfdsS9z/P0.jpg)
On the album cover, Mayer wields his guitar like a phallus. John Mayer’s “Sob Rock” era comes with an aesthetic both pristine and sublimely ridiculous: rich Florida retiree in the 1980s, Alessandro Mendini, the Sony Discman, proto-“American Psycho,” near-peak cocaine. Right off the top, it needs to be said: great merch.