John Mayer has spent the past decade cultivating a dubious notoriety. In an era somehow populated with multiple David Duke gaffes, he’s the guy whose reputation was tangibly harmed by it.
He also makes music, which is perennially hampered by four problems. One: overcompensating with clever-clever lyrics and interview stunts because of a deep embarrassment at sharing a market segment with Shawn Mendes and Ed Sheeran. Two: a willingness to play PR ball and juice up otherwise bland singles with celebrity gossip, admitting to the New York Times that at the center of “Still Feel Like Your Man” was Katy Perry, a confession certain to please the tabloids. Three: a clockwork fascination with the trends of the times, which in 2017, means yacht-rock smarm with a pinch of Dave Longstreth and James Blake’s falsetto-processing trickery. And, most damningly: a fundamental boringness to his records designed to be offset by a winning personality. He writes musical nonentities that resemble entities when sung by a sensitive troubadour, except this troubadour is off spewing napalm through Playboy’s pages.
All of this would be best left in the past if The Search for Everything hadn’t dredged it up as part of a deliberate tour of contrition—his second. For the public, we get another round of apologies for the antics that supposedly torched his career. The industry gets a course-correction from the studied, Laurel Canyon-inflected folk that actually did torch his career (it’s telling that his last two actual hits were a Katy Perry duet and a Beyoncé cover) into slick soft-rock. It’s a strategy last used by Robin Thicke on Paula, another expensive plea of an album released by a media heel. Like Paula, Mayer’s seventh studio album backfires spectacularly. One never forgets how much and how blandly Mayer doth protest.
He’s undoubtedly a good curator of musicians, and his core trio—including longtime D’Angelo bassist Pino Palladino and veteran studio drummer Steve Jordan—lend the record an understated groove. There will likely be few albums this year so consistently pleasant. But even though The Search for Everything is his admitted attempt to produce megahits again, with a sound adjacent to the slick ’70s yacht rock that’s become an obsession of Max Martin among others, he’s reluctant to commit to anything more than pleasant. The closest is “In the Blood,” with stadium-ish percussion and sunny backing vocals from an uncredited Sheryl Crow, but even that only goes halfway: neither as undeniable as he’s aiming for nor as scuzzy as he probably wants.
Then there’s that old inescapable problem, the part where John Mayer says words. “Emoji of a Wave” is a perfectly fine ballad, with a perfectly fine Cat Stevens lilt and harmonies by the Beach Boys’ Al Jardine. But then there’s the title. Why? Nothing in the song suggests emoji, or anything past 1975. The only explanation is Mayer trying to spritz it up with cheap modernity, which is bad lol. The limply funky “Rosie” is an early-’00s throwback, in the sense that Mayer’s bit about learning (just for her!) the Spanish words for “excuse me” and “I’m sorry” is gratuitous Latin courting. “Roll It on Home” and “Love on the Weekend” are windswept country-pop songs of the kind the Nashville songwriting machine commissions by the dozens, but Nashville would never greenlight overwritten lyrics like “I’ll be dreamin’ of the next time we can go into another serotonin overflow.” (Even Róisín Murphy barely pulled that off, and at least she got the right bonding hormone.)
It’s progress, probably, that Mayer keeps the condescension to a dull sneer, but this also makes everything sound that much more anodyne. “Still Feel Like Your Man” asks how sympathetic can a narrator really be when he begins by bragging about how the prettiest girl in the room totally wants him? It also asks what if, instead of Justin Timberlake, Michael Jackson’s “Love Never Felt So Good” spliced in a frat boy? It’s a remarkable demonstration of Mayer’s fundamental problem: suffering simultaneously from an excess of taste and an oblivious lack of it, a Fleetwood Mac heart and a Jack Johnson brain. If only he could start recording separately from himself.
