Continuum- John Mayer

You either like John Mayer or you don’t, but you pretty much can’t ignore Continuum. In speaking of the change in his music recently, Mayer said “I’m growing up, and I wanted my music to be relevant 20 years from now like the music I love. Pop music is so easily dated.” Last year John decided to leave Grammys and chart positions behind in favor of making the music that he loved. (Ironically gaining him higher chart positions and more Grammys than before) He teamed with Springsteen’s drummer Steve Jordan and bassist Pino Palladino for a brief run as the John Mayer trio. Then they went into Manhattan’s Avatar Studios to record Continuum. I was working at Avatar at the time but didn’t work on the album at all because my supervising engineer was working with Billy Joel. It’s fun to know I was nearby though, and probably broke down mics on some of these sessions.

While Mayer calls the music on Continuum “blues” generically, it embraces the R&B and Soul styles of many popular artists of the 60’s and 70’s and legitimately forges some new territory of its own. As a guitarist, I love the tones he gets on this album. I’m pretty sure it’s all Stratocaster guitar-wise, but man I want to know what some of those amps are. Some musical highlights for me are the ‘guitar, then rhodes, then hammond’ solo sequence in the falsetto-full “Vultures”; the muted trumpet sound he gets out of his guitar on “I Don’t Trust Myself With Loving You”; the hugely wet spring reverb of the Fender Vibrolux on “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room” or the Claptonesque main theme of the same song, or its overdriven Princeton solo.

As a piece of recording art it’s interesting because they went for the almost reverbless sound of Motown records. Even the drums are very dry which is interesting considering Avatar probably has the best big drum room in the country. The one notable exception to this is the Steinway B in “Dreaming With a Broken Heart” which sounds as huge as John Lennon’s piano in Imagine. The album was recorded on the sonically rich medium of analog tape, which I’m happy to say is making a major comeback these days. He sings into a Neumann U-67 And the SA-CD mix comes right off the repro head of the Spitz Modded 1/2” Ampex. (That little tech moment was for Jason) Translated, it’s beautiful because it’s not trying to be modern. It’s embracing the weaknesses of an “outdated” technology because of the sound.