“Gravity” by John Mayer, Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Continuum was John Mayer's third critically and commercially successful album. It combined soft rock, blues, and folk rock. After a series of tours and the live album Try! with Pino Palladino and Steve Jordan billed as the John Mayer Trio, Mayer had become a renowned musician’s musician. Drawing comparisons to and striking alliances with classic rock artists such as Tom Petty and Eric Clapton, Mayer was a presence on pop charts and adult contemporary radio. Continuum contained one of Mayer’s biggest pop hits, “Waiting for the World to Change.” Still, Mayer’s reputation as a pop star in the public eye would suffer from a series of cringy statements and not-so-age-appropriate associations following his 2006 album.
STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM ME. In 2005, John Mayer teamed up with Pino Palladino and Steve Jordan to cover classic blues songs on the album Try! Mayer also included two songs from his album Heavier Things and two songs from the upcoming album, Continuum. One of the new songs was “Gravity.” A year before recording Continuum, Mayer determined the name of the album and decided to explore the theme of time. He told Esquire: “I'm obsessed with time lately, constantly crunching the numbers to get some sense of where I stand in the continuum.” The title “Gravity” has nothing to do with time, but the song’s themes explore what it means to be stuck in a rut. Gravity symbolizes the speaker’s limitations, and while not directly stated, time still appears to be the enemy, limiting the speaker’s immortality. In concert, Mayer said that “Gravity” was the “most important song [he’s] ever written” and that the song is “a time capsule.”
JUST KEEP ME WHERE THE LIGHT IS. “Gravity” is an adult rock song with blues and folk rock guitars. It’s a simple, lazy afternoon musically with a bit of an existential crisis in the lyrics. While John Mayer has called the song his most important song, the one that synthesized his ideas and themes from Continuum, “Gravity” feels quite straightforward. Maybe it was an artist’s struggle. Mayer was by critical acceptance at his peak, but perhaps he felt that he could have been doing more musically. Many people, even when, they feel they are trying their best feel like they are in a rut, whether it is language learning or mastering the fretboard. Sometimes the most complex idea that you try to explain comes in a synthesized explanation. Maybe that’s the gravity we’re trying to escape, or maybe just defy.
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