”The fun of having Silver Sky as a project that I can always be working on is that I can test colors out on myself. As to whether or not it’s a real thing in terms of other people having one? It’s definitely being talked about. ”Well, it’s a real thing in the sense that I have one. So let’s just get right to it: In the video for the first single from Sob Rock, Last Train Home, you’re playing your signature PRS Silver Sky model, but in a never-before-seen pink finish. But before diving into the nuts and bolts of the record, there was one burning question we had to get out of the way… On the eve of its release, Mayer sat down with Guitar World to discuss how he built, and ultimately steered, the Sob Rock ship, from the music he referenced to the gear he employed to his approach to crafting solos. “It was like, here’s the three-and-a-half minutes – how do you inject it with as many moments and layers as possible? How can you just keep jam-packing it with payoffs? What we’re really talking about is, what’s so wrong about a guilty pleasure? Or, what’s so guilty about someone making a record that goes, ‘I’m setting out to please you as much as I possibly can with the art of melody.’ Someone may not like that, but I’m proud to go down with that ship.” “It took forever to work on these songs,” he continues. I’m just going to be as absolutely melodic and generous as I can be.’ And I was just putting more and more and more melody on each and every one of these songs. “I went, ‘Well, I’m just going to go for it. “There is nothing in this record that has any sandpaper on it,” Mayer says. The result is an expertly written, beautifully recorded – courtesy of ace producer Don Was – and unabashedly warm and tuneful listen. From the blooming, chorus-drenched guitar triads that define the ultra-hooky first single, Last Train Home to the laidback rhythms and clean, shimmering licks of Wild Blue, the Springsteen-ian (and we’re talking of Tunnel of Love Bruce here) swell of Carry Me Away to the richly layered instrumentation and adult-contempo vibes of Shot in the Dark, Sob Rock is Mayer at, as he puts it, his most “generous”. If it brings you joy and it brings other people joy, what happens if you just do it?’”Īnd Mayer did, in fact, do it. I told myself, ‘Don’t steer away from it. “I’m using sonic color-coding, like the sonic paint codes from the '80s, but I’m making new images with them. Sounds unusually specific? It is. “I don’t want to say it’s a costume, but it is an intention,” Mayer says. I’m using sonic color-coding, like the sonic paint codes from the '80s, but I’m making new images with them The result is a record that recalls Eric Clapton and Fleetwood Mac, Toto and Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen and Steve Miller and various members of the Eagles – but recalls, precisely, the type of matured, occasionally mellowed-out music these seasoned artists were making in the '80s. “I think everyone who makes music comes at it from a fantasy,” he says, “but for me the fantasy this time was, what if it’s 1988 and I had had a band in the late '60s through the '70s, and now I’m my age in the '80s and people are handing me these things called chorus pedals, or people are going, ‘Hey, you don’t need a tube amp anymore.’ And I go, ‘You don’t? Okay.
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