“I'M NOT SURE HOW I'D FEEL IF SOMEONE WROTE MY SONG BEFORE I DID!”
Total Guitar|September 2021
English singer-songwriter Mary Spender was already a successful YouTuber when she had the idea to finish and release John Mayer’s new single before he could. “I’m glad he had a sense of humour about it”, she says...
Jonny Scaramanga
“I'M NOT SURE HOW I'D FEEL IF SOMEONE WROTE MY SONG BEFORE I DID!”

Mary Spender is unusual among YouTube guitarists because she’s best known for her original music. In March, John Mayer teased the release of his single, Last Train Home, with a TikTok clip of the video. A few days later, Spender had written, recorded, and released a video of her vision of how the full track might sound, beating Mayer to the punch. Luckily, John took it well, promoting Mary’s video on his Instagram and making a cameo in the follow-up. She told us how it happened...

How did you get the idea to write and release John’s single before him?

I saw social media going wild and I just got a butterfly of inspiration. I just went ahead and did it. I didn’t expect him to see it, let alone what happened next. It was a time-sensitive situation because I thought the single was going to be released that Friday, and it was Tuesday when I started recording the song and filming the process. Sometimes I get that moment of inspiration, and I was like, ‘Oh god this is such a good idea. Someone else obviously thought of it already, surely?’ Luckily no one had. I felt like I found my niche on a platform like YouTube, where it’s so difficult because basically everything has been done already. This was actually an original concept.

Were you more inspired because of that deadline?

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