John Mayer's a dreamboat – we've all known this for some time – but wait 'til you get a load of this tidbit. In a new conversation on Alex Cooper's Call Her Daddy podcast, the sultry guitar legend has revealed he's partial to a spot of guitar playing naked after having sex.
After breaking up the hour-long conversation with performances of Slow Dancing in a Burning Room and Why Georgia, Cooper asks Mayer if he plays guitar before he gets down to business in the bedroom.
“No, I do it after sometimes,” Mayer responds. “No, you should never play guitar to have sex with someone, but a little naked guitar playing after is very memorable, sitting on the end of the bed with a little gut hanging over – it's nice.”
“I like the way people look when they fold up all weird when they sit up,” he adds. “No matter who you are, you look weird when you sit up, and it's cute.”
Too much information? Not enough? Either way, that's the extent to which Mayer explains his tongue-in-cheek enthusiasm for naked guitar playing, but he does also talk about how playing guitar helps him reason with his standing as a mega celebrity.
“If I'm having a day when I don't like any of this stuff, I can pick up a guitar and listen to myself play and go, ‘That's why you do it,’” he says. “So the fact that it's all linked to something I do objectively well, that I can listen to; I can write a song, I can play a song, I can play guitar – that's what anchors me to all of this stuff.
“All of this is happening to me because I play guitar, write music and sing in a way that people want to pay attention to.
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“I can't imagine what this would be like if I didn't have that grounding element. And as I get older I have so much empathy for people who are really well-known but don't quite have something to hold onto like a buoy. My life gives me this buoy, which is, I can write a song, I can play guitar.”
Back in October, we recalled the time John Mayer, in 2008, covered Van Halen's Panama with an Eddie Van Halen Frankenstein guitar.
Though available footage from the Mile High Music Festival is pretty blurry, it’s just about good enough to make out a shirtless Mayer going to town on whammy wiggles and fretboard taps aplenty throughout.
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Sam was Staff Writer at GuitarWorld.com from 2019 to 2023, and also created content for Total Guitar, Guitarist and Guitar Player. He has well over 15 years of guitar playing under his belt, as well as a degree in Music Technology (Mixing and Mastering). He's a metalhead through and through, but has a thorough appreciation for all genres of music. In his spare time, Sam creates point-of-view guitar lesson videos on YouTube under the name Sightline Guitar.
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