Songoftheday 7/5/23 - Welcome to the real world she said to me condescendingly, take a seat take your life plot it out in black and white...
"No Such Thing" - John Mayer
from the album Room For Squares (2001)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #13 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 18
Today's song comes from singer/songwriter/guitarist John Mayer, who grew up in suburban Connecticut, before moving to Atlanta to start a music career in a duo with friend Clay Cook. Also the duo, dubbed Lo-Fi Masters, didn't work out, several songs the pair had written together would appear on Mayer's independently-released first EP (extended play single) Inside Wants Out. (That eight-song set would be rereleased and make #22 on the Billboard 200 sales tally in 2002.) One of those songs, "No Such Thing", would also be included on John's debut full-length album after signing to Columbia Records, Room For Squares, which came out in the fall of 2001. The lyrics are a sardonic look at "playing it safe" in high school as opposed to pursuing ones dreams (surely already a privileged point of view to begin with). But laid on a breezy lite-jangle-pop background, the snarkly words delivered in John's gruff whisper wash over you without leaving too much of an impression. Only when he goes falsetto on "Scream at the top of my lungs" in the chorus does he stray, along with a creepy "I am invicible" at the bridge. Nevertheless the public (especially the women of a certain age) ate this self-assured shit up. But hey, it was professionally performed, and the jazzy arrangement does wonders, and almost a year after the album's release, Mayer scored his first top-40 pop hit...
"No Such Thing" climbed into the top-20 of Billboard magazine's Hot 100 in August of 2002. On the radio, the song topped the nascent Adult Album Alternative (or "Triple A") Rock chart for a week, peaked at #8 on the Mainstream Top-40 list, rose to #5 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format, and stopped just below the top ten on the Adult Contemporary (or "Easy listening") radio chart at #11. Internationally, the single made the top-40 in New Zealand (#14) and Australia (#28), and almost made it there in the United Kingdom (#42). The Room For Squares album, released in September of 2001, crested at #8 on the Billboard 200 sales chart, going on to sell over five million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2003, John Mayer was nominated for Best New Artist, losing to the then-unstoppable Norah Jones.
Both John and the Room For Squares album will be back to the series.
(7/10)
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and lastly, live in an intimate concert in Australia in 2006...
Up tomorrow: Country star seeks quality material.
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