John Mayer speaks with designer Jerry Lorenzo about quitting drinking after Drake’s 30th birthday party in a new interview for Complex.
Mayer, 41, who has now been sober for two years, says of drinking alcohol: “It’s the most personal thing to people. If I were to tell other people how they could do it, it just is so particular to your own spirit and your own psychology that it’s almost impossible to develop one way of explaining it to someone else.
“You have to fight really hard to look at it from a critical point of view because it’s constantly pushed on you.”
Mayer explains how Drake was involved in his decision to become teetotal: “Oh, I have the most amazing last-night-of-my-life drinking story. It was Drake’s 30th birthday party and I made quite a fool of myself. It took me weeks to stop doing this every morning I woke up. And then I had a conversation with myself.”
The musician says that he was on the sixth day of his hangover when the convo took place.
“I looked out the window and I went, ‘OK, John, what percentage of your potential would you like to have? Because if you say you’d like 60, and you’d like to spend the other 40 having fun, that’s fine. But what percentage of what is available to you would you like to make happen? There’s no wrong answer. What is it?’ I went, ‘100.’”
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Mayer continues: “That next year, I did four tours, I was in two bands, I was happy on airplanes. So what happens when you stop drinking? The level feels like boredom at first. But if you stick with it, the line straightens out and it goes kind of low. You’re like, ‘Oh, I’m not having these high highs.’ But if you work, you can bring the whole line up.”
The star also discusses sympathizing with fellow celebs who go off the rails on social media.
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He says, as Kanye West is mentioned in the interview: “That’s a great question, and that’s a great word, ‘sympathize’. Yeah, I sympathize. I look at it very differently, though. What happens when you decide to make an invention of yourself?
“Artists have always been inventions, right? We decide, ‘Oh, I think I’m gonna be that.’ Some people go, ‘I think I’m gonna make all of this that. I think I’m gonna move all of my chips into the idea of this living invention.’ And you can lose yourself in the invention. So I don’t even begin to look at this like ‘crazy’ or ‘off the rails.'”
