A solo effort. John Mayer opened up about his path to sobriety more than two years after he quit drinking.
“I just finished. I completed my course in drinking,” the singer, 41, explained during his Friday, March 1, appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “Thankfully, for me — I’m very lucky — it didn’t go all that deep.”
He continued: “I just went, ‘You know, I think I’m done.’ It’s like Forrest Gump running and he just stops running at some point. ‘I think I’m out.’ So I punched out.”
Mayer noted that he quit on his own after having “a good, long talk with” himself.
The Grammy winner revealed in a November 2018 cover story for Complex that Drake had a hand in his decision to kick alcohol. “I was doing a show with Dave Chappelle, and Drake was in the audience. Drake came up, he said hello. And I hadn’t seen him since his birthday,” he recalled. “He reminded me — well, he didn’t really remind me, he told me for the first time ‘cause I was pretty far gone, it was the last night I had ever had a drink — that when I said goodbye to him, and was about to leave the club and go into the street, I put my arms out in front of him and I said, ‘Remember me, and remember this,’ and just walked out.”
Mayer admitted that he later found out what he said was not as bad as he thought. However, he suffered from a six-day hangover following the October 2016 party. “I looked out the window and I went, ‘OK, John, what percentage of your potential would you like to have? Because if you say you’d like 60, and you’d like to spend the other 40 having fun, that’s fine,’” he said. “’But what percentage of what is available to you would you like to make happen? There’s no wrong answer. What is it?’ I went, ‘100.’”
The “Gravity” crooner divulged to Rolling Stone in June 2017 that instead of drinking, he took up smoking weed. “I never had a serious issue with [alcohol], but I remember looking around going, ‘This feels rigged. I’m taking a break,’” he told the magazine at the time. “There’s never an amount that I felt like I was succeeding at life. It always felt wrong.”
