is all grown up. Since teaching himself guitar at the age of 13, the Canadian prodigy has been breaking records and melting hearts with his dreamy pop hits and magnetic stage presence. But in 2022, following a public breakup and nearly a decade in the spotlight, the singer put it all on hold, citing post-pandemic stress as the reason for abruptly canceling his Wonder world tour.
MENDES: Yeah, man. It’s awesome to be doing this interview with you because you know what I’m talking about. It’s exactly what you said. While you’re writing it, if you can humble yourself to the point of, “This is potentially boring right now, but it’s okay.”MAYER: I call it the self-impressment threshold. Because it’s rare when you sit down and play something you didn’t know you had in you. You’ll always be working within your skill set.
MENDES: Because of therapy and the experience of being burned and frozen, I’m not as extreme anymore.MENDES: Both. When I say burned, I mean one end of the spectrum, and frozen the other. I am not doing this black-or-white, binary thing as much anymore, and that allows me to keep flowing. I would get onto a concept about life and how to live, and I’d hold that so tight for six months.
MAYER: It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to keep singing it over and over again, just to feel it. There are so many moments on this album that I can picture you standing behind the console just losing your mind, listening back going, “Oh my god, that’s mine.”MAYER: You’ve done this for long enough that inevitably, there are things that have changed in culture and in the music industry, compared to when you started.
MAYER: Yeah. This isn’t meant to diminish anything you’ve gone through, but everything that you’ve wrestled with just seems to be the natural progression of figuring out getting older. But because you’re so sensitive to things, it can read with the kind of severity that something’s a real emergency. You didn’t make a wrong turn.MAYER: The idea that you’ve turned it into a record is so exciting to me.
MAYER: So if you’re reading those lyrics, because we all use the teleprompter, what would you want to say to the kid who wrote them? MAYER: Are you currently sharing space between your journey and being there for someone else, or are you just leaving that room?