John Mayer went from being a guitar wunderkind to being, well, pretty much the worst guy in your high school. He dropped the n-word in an interview, made the bizarre claim that his “dick is sort of like a white supremacist,” and cockily described ex-girlfriend Jessica Simpson as “sexual napalm.” He’s spent the intervening years focusing on music, comedy (he’s amusing if he’s not doing stand-up), and the Grateful Dead supergroup, Dead & Company, the likes of which have helped him stay out of the tabloids.
He’d like you to remember that, too, the next time you trash him. “Some people still say, ‘That guy’s a dick,’” Mayer told Billboard in a new cover story. “And I go, ‘Well, any of that data you’re working off of is really old.’ I mean, I can tell you for sure that I haven’t been a dick in many years. That’s a really outdated take.”
(Read: The 10 Most Obnoxious Things Ever To Happen In Music)
He added, “I probably had a run in my life where I wasn’t aware that there was anything I couldn’t have. And it made a monster out of me. And there’s something very freeing about ‘You can’t.’ And that’s about the right age in your life where you go, ‘Yeah, you can’t.’”
That’s cool and all, but it was only a few years ago that he was throwing shade at ex-fling Taylor Swift. Old habits die hard.