OLD LOVE

On his new album, JOHN MAYER lives out a very specific rock ’n’ roll fantasy: “What if it’s 1988 and I had had a band in the late ’60s through the ’70s, and now I’m my age in the ’80s and people are handing me these things called chorus pedals?” The result is Sob Rock, a highly polished, extra-“generous” studio offering that slyly channels the guitarist’s high-school–days guitar gods — including Journeyman-era ERIC CLAPTON

- Richard Bienstock

LET’S FACE IT: 2020 was a helluva year. We all dealt with the global pandemic, the resulting lockdown and the general disruption and destruction of normal, everyday life in our own way. In John Mayer’s case, he made a record.

And the record he made, Sob Rock, his eighth solo effort overall, is unlike any he has recorded previously. Its 10 tracks look to the past — specifically, the Eighties music of Mayer’s childhood — in an effort to conjure a sound that, he admits, brought him comfort in uncomfortable times. “I started making music that I would find really soothing,” he says.

But the record also does something else. In revisiting the sounds of his youth, Sob Rock reconstitutes a sort of pop craftsmanship — tightly arranged, highly melodic, excessively hooky songs executed with session-player proficiency and finished with a big-budget studio sheen — that has been largely jettisoned in an era of bedroom computer recording, flown-in tracks, autotuned vocals, digital cut-and-paste arrangements and earbud-attuned production styles.

Of course, as anyone who has followed Mayer’s career over the past 20 years can attest, this is not the first time he has created music that sounds vaguely “Eighties.” But whereas other artists aiming to invoke the vibe of that decade might merely slather on some sparkly synths, break out a drum machine or rip a hot-rodded solo over a power ballad, Mayer’s musical mind works in more nuanced ways. Sob Rock succeeds not because it references a sound from the past, but because it does so with such remarkable specificity. It’s an exercise in what the 43-year-old Mayer calls “wish fulfillment.”