John Mayer: Snapshot

John Mayer: Five Fun Facts

1. At 8, John Mayer was inspired to take up the guitar after watching Michael J. Fox play "Johnny B. Goode" in Back to the Future.
2. After high school graduation, John Mayer spent 15 months working as a full-service gas station attendant for $7 an hour. "My mission at the Mobil station was to become the best squeegee in the land," he told In Style. "One full swipe, corner to corner. I never let a single drop of liquid remain." He used the cash to buy a 1996 Stevie Ray Vaughn signature Stratocaster – one he still uses to this day.
3. John Mayer admits to one quirky pastime: vacuuming. "I just love to see an array of dust and bits of paper...go from being there to disappearing with one stroke," he told Newsweek.
4. John Mayer collects pricey timepieces. "I must have 40 or 50," he told In Style. "A man's got two shots for jewelry: a wedding ring and a watch. The watch is a lot easier to get on and off than a wedding ring."
5. John Mayer's first celebrity crush? Paula Abdul. "You could play 'Straight Up' for me and I would probably have a Pavlovian response to it," he said in 2006. "I see her on American Idol today and I think she's smoking."

John Mayer: Biography

1998

Southern Sojourn

After two semesters at Boston's Berklee College of Music, Mayer drops out to pursue music and relocates to Atlanta, Georgia. "Atlanta's my musical home," he says in 2003. "It really was the place where I really came alive." He becomes a frequent performer at local blues clubs, self-releases his first album, Inside Wants Out, and performs at the prestigious South by Southwest Music Festival in 2000, where he lands a contract with Columbia Records' Aware Records.

2001

Big Break!

Mayer releases his major-label debut, Room for Squares, prominently featuring Mayer's fetching face on the cover. It climbs to No. 8 on the Billboard 200 and sells more than 4 million copies on the strength of such singles as "No Such Thing" and "Your Body is a Wonderland."

2002

Enter Jennifer Love

Mayer gets his muse when he meets actress Jennifer Love Hewitt. The two begin an intense – but brief – relationship. "It was a strange little detour that I took for a minute," he tells EW, admitting he had been "madly in love." "It sucks. Because the idea of it was fantastic. It just didn't work." As for the rumor that "Your Body is a Wonderland" is an ode to Hewitt? Not so, she insists to PEOPLE. "John would have written, 'Your body is a disaster.'"

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