Mayer has a neurological condition called synaesthesia, which causes him to see music as colors. He can describe any music he hears by the colors he perceives in it, and says Rock music is usually brown and gray. Jimi Hendrix sometimes talked about seeing colors in music and may have also had the condition.
In middle school, John Mayer played clarinet with little success. After watching the movie Back to the Future, Mayer was inspired by Michael J. Fox's guitar scene to pick up the instrument himself. "My father rented an acoustic guitar from the music store," Mayer recalled to ABC News. "I remember looking at the guitar going, 'Well, if I knew how to play you, I would play you.' And it was that simple. It was just like, I'm not gonna stand for not knowing how to play this. And I still don't."
Although he's had several songs at the top of the charts, John Mayer considers "
Your Body Is A Wonderland" to be his only "hit" song. In an interview with
Rolling Stone, Mayer said "It's the biggest hit I've ever had, maybe will ever have. There wasn't a lot of music in that song. It's a novelty tune. I don't have Lady Gaga-sized hits."
John Mayer is a tabloid mainstay, but he doesn't have very much respect for celebrity blogger Perez Hilton. Mayer told Rolling Stone that Hilton is "not anyone the world should be scared of" and that he's "uneducated and highly opinionated."
Film critic Roger Ebert fired back at John Mayer for comments he made regarding black women. Ebert, who's married to an African American woman, wrote on Twitter: "To John Mayer regarding black women: What's not to like?" The post was a response to Mayer's Playboy interview in which he responded "I don't open myself to them" when asked about his attraction to black women.
At 17, John Mayer suffered a bout of cardiac dysrhythmia, a condition that hospitalized him for a weekend. Mayer admits that he suffers from panic attacks and takes Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, to control his condition.
In 2004, the late Steve Jobs personally asked John Mayer to perform at Apple's annual Macworld Conference and Expo. Jobs used Mayer's performance as a fixture for the event and introduced his company's new Garageband software at the same time. Mayer appeared at the Expo again in 2007 for the announcement of the new iPhone.
In 2006, John Mayer appeared on the TV show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and performed "Waiting on the World to Change" and "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room." His song "Gravity" was also featured in the shows House and Numb3rs.
Many oldies acts take comfortable gigs performing on cruise ships, but Mayer got into it early: he hosted two theme cruises for the Carnival Cruise line. The first was a three day trip to the Caribbean in 2008 that also featured David Ryan Harris, Colbie Caillat, and David Barnes aboard the Carnival Victory. The second went to Mexico aboard the Carnival Splendor in 2009.
Mayer was forced to follow an extended vocal hiatus and couldn't tour for a couple of years after granulomas were discovered in his throat in September 2011.
John Mayer quit drinking after he made a fool of himself at Drake's 30th birthday party in 2016. "[I] had a conversation with myself," he told
Complex. "I remember where I was. I was in my sixth day of the hangover. That's how big the hangover was."