John Mayer

John Clayton Mayer was born October 16, 1977, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of a high-school principal and a middle-school English teacher. Marty McFly's guitar scene in Back to the Future hooked him; his father rented him a guitar at 13, and a neighbor's Stevie Ray Vaughan cassette sent him down a blues rabbit hole so deep that his parents twice took him to a psychiatrist about it. He lasted two semesters at Berklee before leaving for Atlanta with Clay Cook, playing coffee houses and Eddie's Attic as the LoFi Masters until Mayer's pop leanings split the duo. The independent EP Inside Wants Out followed in 1999.

Aware Records put Room for Squares out as an internet-only album in early 2001, and Columbia remixed and re-released it that September with "3x5" added. It grew by word of mouth and touring, topping the Heatseekers chart by March 2002, and "No Such Thing," "Your Body Is a Wonderland" and "Why Georgia" became radio hits, with critics comparing him to Dave Matthews. "Wonderland" peaked at number 18 and won him the 2003 Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance; his acceptance speech was "This is very, very fast, and I promise to catch up." He has said he wrote it about his first girlfriend at 14, and Blender magazine put it at number 28 on its list of the 50 worst songs ever. Room for Squares remains his best seller, past five million copies in the United States.

Heavier Things debuted at number one in September 2003, and "Daughters" won Song of the Year at the 2005 Grammys, an award Mayer later said should have gone to Alicia Keys' "If I Ain't Got You." Then he announced he was "closing up shop on acoustic sensitivity." He played with Buddy Guy, B.B. King and Eric Clapton, formed the John Mayer Trio with Pino Palladino and Steve Jordan in 2005, opened for the Rolling Stones, and released Continuum on September 12, 2006. Columbia thought the record had no hits and pushed him to write "Waiting on the World to Change," the song he has said he least likes playing live. It won him two Grammys at the 2007 ceremony, where the album was also up for Album of the Year.

He landed on the 2007 Time 100, hosted a fan cruise called the Mayercraft Carrier in 2008, and later retreated from public life after a run of media controversies that are a different chapter. The early-2000s image, a curly-haired kid with an acoustic guitar singing about wonderlands, is the one that stuck.