The Current Situation

John Mayer – Tumblr

I have no idea how to intro­duce this post, so I’m skip­ping the first paragraph.

Dur­ing rehearsal on Tues­day, it came to mind that I should see my throat doc­tor because some­thing didn’t feel/sound right. I went in for a visit on Wednes­day and a scope of my vocal cords revealed that the gran­u­loma has grown back where it had mostly healed. This is bad news. Because of this, I have no choice but to take an indef­i­nite break from live per­form­ing. Though there will be a day when all of this will be behind me, it will side­line me for a longer period of time than I care to have you count down.

I want to explain this a bit more in depth than I have in the past, because I know there’s some con­fu­sion as to what this con­di­tion is; a gran­u­loma forms and con­tin­ues to snow­ball because it’s in a spot where the vocal cords hit together and there’s no way to really give it a chance to heal with­out a good stretch of time and some pretty inten­sive treat­ment. In short, it’s one giant pain in the ass.

Okay, so here’s the plan… Born and Raised will be released as sched­uled, but because I don’t make a very good anything-other-than-a-musician, I’m going to begin writ­ing the next album very soon. I feel really vibrant as a writer at the moment and there’s no rea­son not to begin the next album project in the time I would have been tour­ing. Some­where in all of this is another surgery and a very long chemically-imposed period of silence, so I hope you’ll under­stand that I have to really pick that date carefully.

I’m pretty emo­tion­ally burnt out at the moment, but please know how hard I tried to resolve this and how dis­ap­pointed I am that I can’t per­form this record yet. I’m com­pletely bummed, espe­cially for all of you who started mak­ing plans to see a show. Noth­ing feels worse than hav­ing to break the stage down before the per­for­mance, and I mean noth­ing. I love this band you were going to hear, I love the guys and girls I work with, and the only thing that stops me from devolv­ing into a pud­dle of tears is know­ing that it’s a long life, and the great­est gift in the world is being able to cre­ate music no mat­ter what the cir­cum­stances. So these are the new cir­cum­stances, and I’ll find a way to make it mean some­thing. That’s all you can ever do.

John