Does John Mayer have Drake to thank for getting sober? The musician revealed he recently celebrated two years of sobriety after making “a fool” of himself at the rapper’s 30th birthday party.
“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,” Mayer, 41, told Complex for his November cover story. “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. Apparently it was like, what did he just say?”
“Chappelle lost it, that [I] would have said that,” the Grammy winner continued. “And I have confirmation from someone else standing next to him that ultimately, I wasn’t so bad that night. I found out it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Apparently held it mostly together.”
After suffering a six-day hangover following the October 2016 bash, Mayer then decided it was time to make a lifestyle change.
“I was in my sixth day of the hangover. That’s how big the hangover was,” the “New Light” crooner explained. “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. 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.’”
Mayer added that the decision to stop drinking is “the most personal thing to people.”
“If I were to tell other people how they could do it, it just is so particular to your own spirit and your own psychology that it’s almost impossible to develop one way of explaining it to someone else,” he told the outlet. “You have to fight really hard to look at it from a critical point of view because it’s constantly pushed on you. Every Friday and Saturday, on social media, there is enabling going on for drinking. What if I woke up every morning on Saturday and Sunday and put my feet on the ground and I just went ‘not hungover’ and put it on social media every day? That would be an influence on people because I think you forget that’s an option.”
He continued: “If you look at drinking the way you would look at anything else, which is risk-reward, what am I giving up? What am I getting? It’s some of the worst odds that ever existed.”
Mayer previously told Rolling Stone in June 2017 that he’d replaced drinking with smoking weed.
“I put it where drinking used to go, and the quality of life has gone up considerably,” he said a the time. “Drinking is a f–king con. How much is enough? Every time I drank, I was looking for some sort of regulated amount. It always feels wrong for me. I always feel like I went overboard. ‘I said two, now it’s three, now we’re at four? “ never had a serious issue with it, but I remember looking around going, ‘This feels rigged. I’m taking a break.’ There’s never an amount that felt like I was succeeding at life. It always felt wrong.”
