He began his career playing acoustic rock gospel , coming slowly towards the blues genre , arriving in 2005 to collaborate with artists like B. B. King , Buddy Guy and Eric Clapton , and by forming the John Mayer Trio. The blues influence is evident in his album Continuum , released in September 2006. He won the Grammy Award in the category of Best Pop Vocal Album for Continuum and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for "Waiting on the World to Change " at the gala 49th Grammy Awards 2007. Battle Studies , his fourth studio album, released in November 2009. Mayer 's career has been extended to include stand- up comedy , writing and graphic design , has written columns for several magazines , including Esquire . It is also engaged in philanthropic activities through his own foundation , "Back to You" . Moreover, since 2006 , due to a series of personal relationships has appeared with some regularity in the gossip magazines .
Mayer was born on October 16, 1977 in Bridgeport , Connecticut. Her parents are Margaret , an English teacher, and Richard , a high school principal both attending a Christian church. Raised in Fairfield, Connecticut , being the second of three brothers. Mayer is Jewish by her father . Growing up in Fairfield, Mayer friend professional tennis player James Blake did. He attended high school there, despite being also enrolled in the Center for Global Studies at Brien McMahon High School in Norwalk , where he studied Japanese. In an interview program Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Mayer said he played the clarinet a while, with little progress . After seeing the guitar playing of Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly in Back to the Future , Mayer became fascinated with the instrument , and when he was thirteen, his father got him one.
Soon after, a neighbor gave him a cassette with music by Stevie Ray Vaughan , which began Mayer's intense liking for blues music. Mayer started taking lessons from the hands of the owner of a guitar shop in the area, and quickly became obsessed with the instrument.
His obsession worried his parents , so they took him twice to see a psychiatrist. Mayer has said the constant arguments between her parents led him to " disappear and create their own world in which to believe." After two years of practice , he started playing at blues bars and other concert halls in the area, combining it with his secondary . Besides playing solo , played with a band called Villanova Junction (for a Jimi Hendrix song ) with Tim Procaccini , Joe Beleznay and Rich Wolf . Mayer even considered dropping out of school to devote himself fully to music, but the disapproval of his parents dissuaded him finally .
At seventeen , he suffered a cardiac arrhythmia , for which he was hospitalized a week. Meditating on the incident, Mayer said, " That was the time when the composer in him was born in me" , and wrote his first lyrics the same night she left the hospital. Shortly after this incident , he began suffering from panic attacks, and lived with the fear of ending admitted to a mental institution. Still suffering from anxiety and fights with Xanax, an antianxiety drug. After graduation , he worked fifteen months at a gas station to raise enough money to buy a Stratocaster Stevie Ray Vaughan 1996.
