“I'M NOT SURE HOW I'D FEEL IF SOMEONE WROTE MY SONG BEFORE I DID!”

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

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?