John Mayer & Jerry Lorenzo Talk Fear of God & Music

Mayer: I’ll go until the doctor tells me bad news. I swear to you, until that day, I’ve got it figured out, and this is the most fun… Every morning I wakeup, I go, “I get another one of these.” And most people figure that out much later on in life. Not drinking has a lot to do with plugging into that a little earlier than other people, but I go, like, “I still get to ride the ride.” And that’s why, when people we love pass away, we go, like, “Oh, you can’t stay on the ride?” When Mac Miller passed away, my first thought was, You don’t get to stay here. You don’t get to keep riding this ride, this beautiful ride that, if you’re lucky enough to have the talent, you get to just keep…

You bring up Mac—you played on “Small Worlds,” and you said that you didn’t expect to be on his album.

Mayer: Well, I didn’t expect to play on his album. He said come over and listen to stuff. This is a true story: I started talking to my manager about splits—I gotta start making a living playing on people’s stuff. For years, it would be, like, a really fun side note. I got to Mac’s house and he played me this thing he had just worked on that morning, and I went, “Give me a guitar. I’m in.” I think it had something to do with him having worked on it that day—it was still wide open and fresh. There are a lot of songs people play for me and I go, “Man, I wish I was on this song, but it’s done.” I picked up a guitar and, I went [Pretends to play the guitar]. We had such a great time and laughed, and I said to him, “No cash. No credit. I’m just happy to do it, man.” He said, “Hey, can I…” I said, “I don’t want people talking about me. I want people talking about your record.” I just wish it wasn’t fatal. I just wish figuring out your life didn’t take your life away from you. I don’t have an answer for how to fix that, but once you get old enough to understand how valuable life is, you look at people and go, “I just wish you could work this out.”

Lorenzo: But I think it’s a constant. Our brand is in a better place. My marriage is in a better place, but I told my wife this is the most unhappiest year of my life because of how hard it was for me to detach and put everything into this [Fear of God] collection and put everything into this Nike collection. To hit rock bottom and hit a low place where I knew only God could take me to the finish line… I’m super happy with the end result, but I don’t know that I did it the best way.

Mayer: Creating great things is like having a restaurant with the messiest kitchen that would get shut down if anybody from the health board walked in. They’d go, “Your kitchen gets an F.” But walking out into the actual restaurant floor with the most beautiful, dainty, delicate little dish that’s so delicious, and you just know that if anybody ever looked behind the doubles winging doors, they would see pure rat-infested chaos.

You said rock bottom, but it was on a project that may be one of the biggest that you’ll ever do. How does that happen? Is it the pressure of making it great? Is it other things that happened?

Lorenzo: Yeah, I think it’s the pressure. My wife will tell you—this Saturday I was shoveling dirt on the campaign [shoot], and I just had to leave set.I was like, “Man, you might have to take me to the hospital. I don’t know where we should go right now, but I can’t be on set anymore.” Even styling the looks the following two days seemed like such a big task. I had just put everything into it. As much as I thought I was putting God first and mixing him into it, trying to balance work and family, I was just so depleted. And I don’t wanna have to get depleted to do what I think is great. I don’t wanna have to be empty. Getting a sneaker, like I said, maybe I honored it too much. You know what I mean? When I got the chance to work with Nike, by no means will we ever be Jordan or be the next Jordan, but that’s where I go. If I can’t try and do something like that, then why am I even playing the game? We’re the same age. It wasn’t about sneaker drops when I was growing up. It was either Jordans or nothing. It was the best, and it was the emotion you got when you felt that thing.

Mayer: It was like a car. You get a Jordan V and it was like getting a new car.

Lorenzo: Imagine designing and creating chasing that emotion. When a kid sees this, whatever he felt when we hopped out of the car at the end of the campaign video, I want you to feel something that I felt when I was in 8th grade, in 9th grade. The pressure of that emotion that you’re chasing can be heavy.

Mayer: It is a fairly new idea looking into the possibility of a creator also having some mental well-being.

We see the behavior of some of the biggest creators of our generation. People who you’ve both worked with—Kanye—you see what’s happening. We see people going off the rails on social media. Do you guys sympathize with that kind of behavior?

Mayer: That’s a great question, and that’s a great word, sympathize. Yeah, I sympathize. I look at it very differently, though. What happens when you decide to make an invention of yourself? Artists have always been inventions, right? We decide, “Oh, I think I’m gonna be that.” Some people go, “I think I’m gonna make all of this that. I think I’m gonna move all of my chips into the idea of this living invention.” And you can lose yourself in the invention. So I don’t even begin to look at this like “crazy” or off the rails. I don’t really have the data to; I don’t think anybody really does. But I can tell you for sure that a component of it is being at your own steering wheel for so many years as a creative god and not knowing how to say, “Well, now I’m a guy.” We’ve hung, and I was always astounded by Kanye’s ability to donate most of who he is to that invention. The problem is I’ve never seen anybody successfully live inside of the giant robot that you’ve built for many, many years. I just feel like I agreed with the universe when I first met Kanye that I was never just gonna beat on the guy, because I saw a genius. I think a lot of people have. But it just goes to show you that even if you are a genius, you’re still just a dude inside of the bigger metallic version of yourself going, “What does this button do?” And if you don’t check in with someone else to tell you maybe step down from that, you just burn into it. Ultimately, what he’s saying is the same thing every artist wants to say, which is to break free of expectation. Artists have been doing this for hundreds of years, responding to the world, finding out what in the world is hypocritical, what in the world is confining you. I think he’s trying to break through these walls. And everybody has a different way of doing that, and he just invented a larger “Hulk smash” of it all and also didn’t build in a fail-safe, which is someone throwing you into a car and saying get out of here. If you don’t have the boss to tell you…

And that’s what you hear. You hear the words “yes men” thrown around.

Mayer: Yo. I would love to be sitting in here and saying, “I have nothing to say about Kanye because he’s somewhere treating himself or he’s somewhere being okay.” But to talk about Kanye… I’m not gonna shy away from the Kanye conversation because it’s like an MMA fight where the guy’s not tapping out and his ref isn’t calling the fight. So he’s still a topic of conversation and I cannot wait until the day it would be insensitive to talk about him. I can’t wait. Please, do us the favor of making it seem a little unsavory and a little tacky to talk about it because you tapped out. Please, tap out. I tapped out. Tap out. You know? Instead the ref’s going, “I don’t know what to do. He’s still fighting. He’s still punching back.”

Lorenzo: I think the thing of yes men is to devalue his own self worth. I don’t think he needs another man to tell him what he needs to do. Kind of like what John was saying, I’m too close to it to have an opinion as well, so I’m looking at it in the backyard also and I’m saying, “Wow. If the world can look at this with so much forgiveness and so much grace and can continue to forgive and find an understanding in what he’s saying, and they won’t do that for the normal people in their life, for their friends, and for other people they live with daily, but they’re giving this idol this level of grace and mercy… Wow. Why don’t we just treat the rest of the world like that and see how much better…