John Mayer is one of those artists who I've been a fan of for over four years now, and yet each time he puts out something new, I approach it with a bit of hesitation. First it was because he shifted his focus from a coffeehouse-friendly acoustic-pop style to more of a glossy, electric, radio-friendly sound that obscured the side of his talents that I was most drawn to. Then it was because he claimed to have "closed up shop on acoustic sensitive" and started a three-piece blues band called the John Mayer Trio - a more artistically respectable move, but not something that I thought was really my "style". Not even a year later, that band dissolved and John went back to recording solo projects, so I kind of expected more of a glossy, poppy approach to blues, and I thought, "no thank you". That may have been small-minded of me, but this was a guy whose music I had enjoyed due to his ability to write clever lyrics and play them in a very open (and sometimes melodically inventive) style on an instrument that I aspired to play as well as he did. I enjoy the electric guitar, too, but I've been partial to the acoustic when it comes to solo artists, so it's taken me time to appreciate Mayer's current focus. But what I've realized is that his newest album, Continuum, despite not having the raw live sound that fans of the Trio album Try! enjoyed, makes up for that, as well as correcting the mistake made on Heavier Things of focusing too much on the pop production. We've still got a pop album here, but one on which the songwriting is about as strong as Mayer's has ever been (for the first two-thirds of the album, anyway). Continuum clues us in that we're still listening to "John Mayer, songwriter", and titles such as "John Mayer, skilled blues guitarist" are secondary.

Now I don't really know enough about blues and jazz and whatever else to tell you the extent to which Mayer is true to those genres and the extent to which he's just made another pop album. I also don't know the extent to which he's merely borrowing musical moods from his heroes - he freely admits to stealing from Eric Clapton in his liner notes, so I'll assume that the focus here is not on coming up with an original style, but rather on writing memorable songs within an established and respected genre. What I can say is that despite my lack of knowledge/appreciation for John's influences, he's come up with a group of songs that (for the most part) sound great without being too obvious of a grab at the pop charts. The guitar work is more subtle, there to convey a feeling, than show-offy in most cases, and John's penned some interesting thoughts about his personal relationships and his overall worldview (including a slight political jab or two) that fit the tone of the music he's playing.

It took some time for me to really get into this album, and I still might prefer the simpler approach of Room for Squares, but the more I listen to Continuum, the more I'm struck by what a solid collection of songs Mayer has managed to stockpile... that is, until I goes and blows it near the end of the set. I guess he can't win 'em all, but since the emphasis is on him and not on overbearing keyboards or drum machines, this one still has tons more replay value than Heavier Things, an album which I've mostly forgotten about aside from two or three songs.

Waiting on the World to Change
Now if we had the power
To bring our neighbors home from war
They would have never missed a Christmas
No more ribbons on their door...
The timing of this song's release was pretty much perfect - late summer/early fall, leading into a holiday season when people would once again have to grapple with the old "peace on Earth, goodwill to men" cliché. The keyboards/bells that ring out here and there certainly give me visions of a snow-covered downtown street bustling with shoppers - but that doesn't mean this is a shamelessly commercial tune; it just reminds me of that time of year. Amidst a laid-back beat and rather subtle, muted guitar playing that sticks mostly to short, rhythmic licks, John makes reference to a political climate that isn't the way that he and his friends want it to be, especially since some of them have loved ones who are still stuck overseas fighting in a war that they might not believe in. We've heard lots of "change the world" type songs on this subject, but John's entry in this category is a little more probing than that - he's pointing out how easy it is to stand around and complain and feel defeated, and just hope it all works out for the greater good someday. "It's not that we don't care", he tells us, "It's just that the fight ain't fair". And he seems to be saying that it might be better to take some sort of action despite feeling like the cards are stakced against us. That he's able to do this without coming across as extremely moralistic or preachy is commendable - some might say it's due to vagueness, but I think he's straddled the fine line between writing a timeless lyric and making sure that he's saying something which specifically applies to the political climate of America, 2006. The only real complaint I can make about this song is its total drag of a go-nowhere bridge, where the guitars and drums are just limply following a beat while John does some half-assed, muttered scat singing. It soon opens up into a nice little guitar solo, but that first section of the bridge is one of very few instances where I find myself wishing radio stations would intentionally edit out part of a song for the sake of time.

I Don't Trust Myself (with Loving You)
I will beg my way into your garden
I will break my way out when it rains
Just to get back to the place where I started
So I can want you back all over again...
This song has a laid-back groove with floating synths and a smooth guitar tone that paradoxically sounds both "cool" and "warm" to me at the same time. It's an unusual move for an album's second track, but that should clue us in that Continuum is going to be an album that flows rather gently from start to finish. This is one of those songs where Mayer excels without showing off at all - he's got a seductive near-falsetto at times, but instead of just using it in a generic love song, he's actually composed a tune that warns a potential lover of his tendency to cut and run when things get serious. It's the classic male "fear of commitment", summed up in a rather eloquent way that helps to soften the blow. He's basically warning a girl ahead of time that he has a hard time staying faithful, and doesn't want to hurt her. (Or you could just say he's making excuses ahead of time so that she can't act shocked when he cheats on her - depends on how cynical of a listener you are.) It's definitely a song that "simmers" more than it "boils", since the guitar action just barely starts to heat up as the song fades out and there's just a little bit of horns blurting here and there when a jazzier mood could have totally overtaken the song in different hands. I'm not totally head-over-heels for this one, but I find it stuck in my head quite a bit, so that's gotta count for something.

Belief
Is there anyone who ever remembers
Changing their mind from the paint on a sign?
Is there anyone who really recalls ever breaking rank at all
For something someone yelled real loud one time?
Another poignant and semi-political song shows up here, utilizing a meandering but smooth electric guitar riff - kind of like a less edgy version of "Neon" - to underscore John's ramblings about how every person believes in something - be it organized religion or staunch atheism or anything in between - and most folks seem to have dug their heels in to the point where all of the shouting and boycotting and jiahds in the world aren't gonna change anyone's mind. While John doesn't say it directly, the implication seems to be that it's easy to recognize that fanatics blowing people up in the name of Allah are obviously wrong, but maybe a little harder to look at ourselves and see how many people in America are waging their own personal wars in hopes of changing the government and its laws to enforce their own beliefs. As the song gains momentum and gives John some room for a guitar break or two, it eventually reaches a hard-hitting refrain: "We're never gonna win the world. We're never gonna stop the war. We're never gonna beat this if belief is what we're fighting for." And some might take that to be an endorsement of some sort of vague "everybody's right, kum ba yah" philosophy, but I see it as more of a statement that if you want to try to share your beliefs with another person in the hopes of maybe persuading them to see things your way, you'd better be prepared to respect their right to disagree with you. No amount of physical violence, or loud-mouthed protesting, or getting laws passed, is gonna change the fact that a person's religious/spiritual beliefs are a matter of their own free choice.

Gravity
Twice as much ain't twice as good
And can't sustain like one half could
It's wanting more that's gonna send me to my knees...
This mellow ballad first appeared on the Try! CD, and stylistically, it's pretty much identical to the live version, with its gently ticking 3/4 beat and its watery, mournful guitar meanderings. This is hardly the first time that John's commented on the excesses and ambitions of being a celebrity, but here he seems to be grappling with the weight of an excessive lifestyle - fly too high and you're almost guaranteed a tragic fall. The "gravity" that he refers to seems to be his enemy, especially when he barks, "Stay the hell away from me!" (which sounds so much better without a host of girlie-girl fans in the background hooting and hollering about how gutsy he is just for saying the word "hell" - can you tell I'm not a huge fan of live albums?), but at the same time, it's kind of a strange ally that serves to keep him grounded, which is a contrast to songs like "Bigger than My Body", where he seemed to want to burn out fast and bright so you'd remember his name. Here he's humbly admitting that he'd better be careful, because "Gravity has taken better men than me." Some soulful background vocals join in near the end of the song as John repeats, "Come on, keep me where the light is", and I might have preferred a little more "passion" to this song's coda before it fades out, but it's still a thoughtful and well-performed slow-burner.

The Heart of Life
You know it's nothing new
Bad news never had good timing
But then your circle of friends
Will defend the silver lining...
You'd expect this song to be cliché city from its title, and sure, it's more of an earnest song that attempts to encourage a friend who is down and out, so while I appreciate the attempt to say, "Life can deal you a bad hand at the worst possible time, but that's the way it happens to all of us and there's a good lesson in it, so take heart", there isn't much new in the lyrics department here. But there are several elements of the song that I really enjoy. Most striking is the smooth, almost liquid tone of the electric guitar, which is picked out beautifully, but there's this consistent "thump" as if he's muting the strings for rhythm, which is a technique I've heard more frequently on the acoustic guitar, so it's kind of a blues song played as if it were an acoustic, coffeehouse-type song translated to a different instrument. The soloing here is gentle but cathartic, as if the guitar is crying tears of joy. And John slips into near-falsetto again, his voice and the guitar wrapping around each other nicely for a sublime listening experience. It's not a song that'll totally blow you away, but hopefully it'll put a warm smile of recognition on your face.

Vultures
Some of us, we're hardly ever here
The rest of us, we're born to disappear
How do I stop myself from being just a number?
How will I hold my head to keep from going under?
This track's got a little more of a groove thing going on, thanks to the consistent bump-ba-bump of the drums and bass, and it's actually the second song that gets an encore appearance after its live debut on Try! It was my favorite track from that set, and it's certainly the track on Conintuum that oozes the most "cool", due to its catchy guitar licks and John's effortless falsetto during the chorus. The chorus is one of those where the rhyming words ring out beautifully ("Down to the wiiiiii-re, I wanted water, but I walk through the fiiiiii-re") and the chorus just rolls off of the tongue when singing along. It's probably John's most striking vocal performance on any of his songs ("Clarity" being the closest contender in that department), and I love the sweet "Oooooh"s near the end, even if I'm not such a big fan of the way that the song meekly fades out after building up several layers of coolness that should have led to a more striking finish.

Stop This Train
So scared of getting older
I'm only good at being young
So I play the numbers game
To find a way to say that life has just begun...
Time warp! This song will take you back to the days of Room for Squares with an acoustic picking pattern that, in addition to sounding like the mirror image of "The Heart of Life", feels a lot like a gentler "83" as well. "83" was a song that reminisced about childhood and how quickly the innocence and simplicity got away from us; this song takes a less humorous, but more poignant approach to the subject of aging. It's hard not to be swept up in the aching beauty as John plainly admits: "I don't know how else to say it; I don't want to see my parents go." Time is described as a "train" that John can't stop despite his best attempts, and through a conversation with his dad, who seems to have come to terms with his life being well more than half over at age 68, he begins to accept the unbending nature of time, but still seems to want to pretend that everyone he ever loved and cared for is still gathered in that house by the warm fireplace each holiday season. As in previous songs like "Home Life", you might be tempted to think that John's way too young to be complaining about getting old, but the very real possibility of losing your parents and no longer having the guidance of older family members who you previously took for granted is very real for a lot of young adults. You can accuse me of being stuck in the past and not accepting John's transition to a different style of music, but this is my favorite track on Continuum, and one that I think is worth hearing even if you're not a John Mayer fan at all. It makes me glad that, despite what he's said, the "acoustic sensitive" shop is still open, albeit with extremely limited business hours.

Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
Can't seem to hold you like I want to
So I can feel you in my arms
Nobody's gonna come and save you
We pulled too many false alarms...
A song with a title such as this one practically begs the obvious label of "slow-burner" - it's too obvious, but yeah, that characterization works. Where "I Don't Trust Myself" emitted a bit of warmth and empathy for a person he didn't want to hurt, this slower and more mournful song lashes out a bit due to the hurt that someone has caused him. We've heard John sing breakup songs before, but this is no "Split Screen Sadness" - he's not the poor sap just wishing a girl would come back to him. He's asking her to confront the fact that "we're going down" despite her best attempts to smooth things over, and despite the slow, seductive tone, he isn't planning on being there as a shoulder to cry on after the relationship inevitably ends. The guitar work is quite lovely here - an instrument that sounded like tears of joy in "The Heart of Life" now sounds like tears of bitterness, and there are a few hotter moments of fury amidst the guitar breaks here. John might take his anger a little too far when he flat-out says, "I'll make the most of all the sadness, you'll be a b!tch because you can", and that's a far cry from the woman-on--a-pedestal sentiments of a song like "Daughters" - it's bound to sting some listeners' ears a bit. I'm not a fan of using that word to describe a woman, personally, but I know how these sorts of drawn-out breakups work, too, where you say things you don't fully mean as warning shots to get the other person to back off and admit defeat. It's complicated.

Bold as Love
My red is so confident that he flashes
Trophies of war and ribbons of euphoria
Orange is young, full of daring
But very unsteady for the first go 'round...
It took me a while to appreciate this Jimi Hendrix cover. Part of that's probably because I'm a youngin' who doesn't have any "respect for the classics" or whatever - but the thing is that the more feisty, rambling tone of this song didn't seem to fit the rest of the album. Which is funny, because it's by far the most lively track on a laid-back album, and you'd think that I'd appreciate the change of pace. I think part of my problem was that it seemed to fit more with the style of the live album (I'm sure it'll be a killer performance when he plays it in concert), and I didn't really care for Hendrix's lyrics - what the heck does it mean to be "bold as love", and what on earth is this "axis" who "knows everything"? It sounded like psychedelic nonsense to me. And maybe it is, but upon closer examination, I have to admit that the characterizations of each color of the rainbow in the verses are doggone clever. John definitely "shows off" with this one, and I guess that's more appropriate given that he's covering a rock guitarist - he does a bang-up job and I can't fault him for doing something slightly more gritty than his usual studio output. This one's more fun to listen to than to sing along to, and it's more "style" than "substance", but I enjoy the tumbling rhythm and the comparatively more "raw" approach, so it's not a big deal that this isn't the sort of thing I normally listen to John Mayer.

Dreaming with a Broken Heart
You roll outta bed and down on your knees
And for the moment you can hardly breathe...
Now here's what I really don't listen to John Mayer for - sappy piano ballads. Not that he's got a ton of 'em - but this one just doesn't work for me at all. It reads like a teenager's diary entry, and while John does an admirable job of emoting the forlorn loneliness that follows a breakup with someone that you really cared about, he's mostly just expressing a lot of empty wishes that she would just appear again. No matter how many times he whines, "Do I have to wake up with roses in my hands?", it's not going to have any effect on me, because this song seriously sounds like it was written by a 13-year-old Coldplay fan. John's guitar doesn't even really figure into the song until the backing band really gets going during the bridge, and by then it's apparent that this is really a generic rock ballad infused with only a slight hint of convincing emotion. This track doesn't fit John's old style, his new style, or any style that he should ever venture further into.

In Repair
Oh, it's taking so long
I could be wrong, i could be ready
Oh, but if i take my heart's advice
I should assume it's still unsteady...
Warm organs open this overly long track about - yet again - dealing with brokenheartedness. At this point we're hovering dangerously close to the generic territory of some of the lesser tracks on Heavier Things, just with a sparser, slower approach. I don't like much about this song until the electric guitar heats up and delivers another delicious solo a bit later on, but by then it's been nearly five minutes of bland shoegazing. I appreciate the sentiment here, that it takes time for the heart to heal, and that a person dealing with a breakup generally goes through this conflict between the mind and the heart, where the mind says, "Just forget about it and get on with your life" while the heart seems unwilling to comply. It's a very honest, relatable sentiment. It's just that John takes way too long to express it. Just when you think it's wrapping up after the solo section, along comes another verse. Sure, maybe "St. Patrick's Day" dragged on and on like this, too, but at least that one was interestingly written.

I'm Gonna Find Another You
You take your sweaters, you take your time
You might have your reasons, but you will never have my rhymes...
The shortest track on the album is saved for the end, and the three lesser tracks that finish off the album kind of serve as a "breakup" trilogy of sorts, so this one's here to close up that arc (which, personally, I think is a much less interesting subject than some of the other issues John's explored on the album, due to its overexposure with comparatively less interesting stuff to say about it). It's a quieter jazz ballad in 6/8 time, not unlike one of the gentle ruminations on a Norah Jones album. Unfortunately, despite the best attempts of the fluid guitar playing and vintage horn section to sound classy, this song is another entry in the "bitterness" category, with John sending off an old lover by telling her that he's gonna go out and find her doppleganger just to make her jealous. Um, can you say "rebound"? It's a pretty immature sentiment that leaves the album on a rather weak note. I want to be attracted to the sassiness of it, but unfortunately there's nothing remotely charming or witty about this song.

OK, so that ending was a real bummer, but I still truly feel that the first seven tracks of this album are examples of some of John's best work, and that Continuum is a worthwhile buy for fans of John's previous work, as well as for those who appreciate more of a singer/songwriter approach to the blues or jazz genres. You'll find pop artists with far catchier hooks and blues/jazz artists with much more captivating command of their instruments, so don't listen to Continuum with some expectation that you're going to be blown away by a landmark performance. Listen to it because you're the kind of person who can let a song slowly soak in where the artist is transparently saying, "This is what my heart looks like", and find something in that song that looks like your own heart, too.

ALBUM WORTH:
Waiting on the World to Change $1
I Don't Trust Myself (with Loving You) $1.50
Belief $1.50
Gravity $1
The Heart of Life $1.50
Vultures $1.50
Stop This Train $2
Slow Dancing in a Burning Room $1
Bold as Love $1
Dreaming with a Broken Heart $0
In Repair $.50
I'm Gonna Find Another You $0
TOTAL: $12.50

Website: http://www.johnmayer.com

Recommended: Yes

Great Music to Play While: Getting ready to go out