14 DAY TRIAL // John Mayer and Taylor Swift’s relationship was short-lived, but admittedly very intense. It also generated so much attention from the media and celebrity pundits online that, to this day, it is still a hot topic.
The breakup wasn’t an amicable one, with Taylor venting about it in the song “Dear John,” while he reportedly wrote “Paper Doll” about her. Artists being artists, the best revenge for them isn’t a dish served cold, but publicly, in a song.
Neither Taylor nor John ever said much about the split and their alleged way of getting back at the other, but he’s finally opening up on the topic, in an interview with Ronan Farrow for MSNBC.
We need to talk about Taylor Swift professionally
The romance happened in late 2009 and early 2010, and Taylor’s “Dear John” came out a couple of years later. As per his own admission, Mayer was blindsided by her decision to trash him in a song and not as much as have the courtesy to call him to let him know what was coming.
However, as you can see in the video below, he’s over all that: when Farrow asks him about an artist’s condition in the current context and how technology is shaping the music industry, he mentions Swift’s decision to pull her catalog from Spotify.
“We have to be able to talk about Taylor Swift professionally,” he says, adding that he thinks Taylor’s move was a “cool” one because it showed all other, smaller acts that they too had more choices available where their music was concerned.
In a way, that was Taylor’s way of giving back to her peers, because she used her profile to shine a light on a problem that many other artists before her had faced, but which they felt they had no other way of solving than by doing what they were told. In saying that she deserved more money for her music, she told them that they too could do the same, if that’s how they felt.
It’s time to move on
Mayer is careful not to engage in any kind of conversation about his personal relationship with Swift. Seeing how much has been written and said on the topic all these years, especially in the tabloids and in the blogosphere, it’s hard to find blame with him for it.
He does, however, have this to add: “Paper Doll,” which many assumed had been written for her, was never that.
“The song never got listened to as a song. It became a news story because of the lyrics. I’m not in the business of telling people what the song’s about,” Mayer says. “Now I can just go, ‘Look, I can say the name Taylor Swift.’ She’s an artist. I’m an artist. Everybody stop, nobody’s got cancer. We’re rich people who get to live out our dreams. Let’s just stop it. I’m a musician who’s bigger than one song or one record.”
In other words, it’s time to move on from this soap-opera-style narrative that had them as protagonists.
Elsewhere in the interview too, Mayer comes across as more mature: becoming one of the most hated musicians online (long before Kanye West perfected the art of being annoying) helped him understand that this was not the road he wanted to walk down on.
He describes himself as a “recovering ego addict,” which is why he has no plans of ever returning to social media, and he claims that he is no longer bothered about much. He doesn’t care anymore about what people are saying about him or his music, because he no longer craves approval. This way, he seems to say, those who do stick by him will be only true fans - and at the same time, testament to his worth as an artist.