I was 10 when John Mayer’s Room for Squares came out in 2001. For me, the album carries that year along with it through time. Whenever it comes on, it comes trailing the smell of the Pacific and the curl of sunlit California mist. My coolest friend, who wielded his own guitar with an effortless assurance that only Mayer himself could surpass, had downloaded the whole thing on Limewire. The man’s voice sounded like barbecue smoke and his riffs felt like wanting to grow up. It was our drug of choice.
It also made me uneasy. The album’s debut single, “No Such Thing,” was about shrugging off the pretensions of social expectation and running free through the halls of your old high school, screaming at the top of your lungs: “I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world / Just a lie you got to rise above.” Adults might tell you how your life should go, but what did they know? The future was what you could make of it.
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