John Mayer Song Quotations

All I want a song to do is just to kind of present an idea.

There wasn't a ton of time to write this record but that's also good because there wasn't a ton of time to freak out either. So it was just about enough time to follow my instinct and put my instinct down ... Your first attempt, your first thumbprint on every song -- that's what you can hear on the record.

I love you more than songs can say, but I can't keep running after yesterday...

I can't stress enough how important it is to write bad songs. There's a lot of people who don't want to finish songs because they don't think they're any good. Well they're not good enough. Write it! I want you to write me the worst songs you could possible write me because you won't write bad songs. You're thinking they're bad so you don't have to finish it. That's what I really think it is. Well it's all right. Well, how do you know? It's not done!

I don't write songs in order to stick it to my exes. I don't release underground dis tracks.

The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still 4 minutes long. You're coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long…I realized about a year ago that I couldn't have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using twitter as an outlet and I started using twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn't write a song.

Yeah, Under The Table And Dreaming shaped the way that I think about writing songs.

Every song I put on a record could be a single and I just pack my bags for it... and the minute it takes off, I'm not gonna be home for a while.

Songs can be Trojan horses, taking charged ideas and sneaking past the ego's defenses and into the open mind.