John Mayer explained himself with a follow-up to his “leave me alone, ex lover” blog post which garnered a lot of interest. It was posted on an external site that also has Japanese-language articles, and yesterday when I skimmed it I actually thought it was a parody of what he would say if he were to write more about it - it’s that pretentious.

Mayer’s follow up is an actual blog entry and not a joke. The site where it was found, Honeyee.com, has real blogs from artists and musicians from Japan, Europe and America.

He said he was trying out a “deceptive resolution” piece for his lyrics, in which he says one thing and then contradicts it at the end. Mayer also claims to have been testing the public out to see if they could “handle his truth.” (He didn’t write that, I stole that from Britney, but that’s essentially what he said.)

Mayer wondered aloud how he would ever write meaningful lyrics about his relationship experiences when people made so much out of a little blog entry harshly telling an ex to go away:

I wouldn’t traditionally take to a blog to explain a blog, and it begs the question as to whether or not anyone who didn’t understand the first one will make any sense of its follow-up, but when it involves the possibility of hurting someone else, I’ll tuck my tail between my legs and explain my intentions. Even though it makes my teeth itch.

The blog - copied from my lyric/idea journal, is all about the P.S. - it’s a writing technique called “deceptive resolution”; you think the story is going one way, only to find that it twists around at the end, using all its momentum to swing in another direction. In this instance, the writer of the missive is saying in as many certain terms as possible that he does not want to see his ex anymore. At the end, the P.S. leaves that all too common contradiction in terms that makes love so messed up. I call it “I wish you were here so I could tell you to leave”.

This actually has some pretty far-reaching ramifications. How will I write an entire record of lyrics when one small blog passage incites so much curiosity? Can I write a song because of somebody but not about them? By way of my experiences but not as a sordid retelling of them? Because if I can’t, I need to rewrite the last line to my new song “Boning you on my helicopter”.

Doin’ The Right Thing Like Mookie,
John

[From Honeyee.com]

Mayer’s writing style really gets on my nerves. He comes across as the type of person who would corner you at a party and tell you a really long story about some minor event in his life that was of no interest to anyone else.

Mayer’s post yesterday telling his ex lover not to contact him was prefaced with “I started scribbling out lyrics and such… Don’t read too far into this on a personal level. (There are no hidden messages)… I just thought it sums up how crazy love can be.”

Even that first sentence is contradictory. Saying there are no hidden messages means we should take something at face value.

There’s a huge difference between a blog and song lyrics, and Mayer either doesn’t seem to grasp that or is trying to act like he didn’t know what he was doing by stirring up a shitstorm with that post. He’s also making a joke with the “boning you on my helicopter” reference, but it comes across as yet another dig to his unnamed ex.

Yesterday Lainey’s gossip covered Mayer’s “leave me alone” post, and she said that she thought he was doing it to f’ck with Jessica Simpson, because she’s so happy without him and he can’t stand that. He ran into her new boyfriend, quarterback Tony Romo, at that Cosmo “Fun Fearless Male” event earlier in the week and that had to have left him feeling loser-ish so he lashed out at her with “lyrics” posted to his blog.

After that “leave me alone” post got publicity, Mayer replaced his blog with “Never complain, never explain,” but then went ahead and did just that with a post somewhere else. That makes him look even weaker than he did by deleting it. It’s like, I’ll half-assed say that I didn’t mean it, that it was some artistic process I was going through, but you’re going to have to find my inadequate explanation on your own.