John Mayer: Square Go.

John Mayer plays the Tivoli Theatre on Thursday.

Atlanta based songsmith John Mayer is about to make his second trip to Australia this year. Admittedly, he didn’t actually get to do a lot of playing the first time around, mostly just working through the record company mill. And a slot on Rove Live.

“I love doing TV,” he enthuses. “I love TV so much that to actually be in the box… that’s the shit right there. I get to be in the TV!”

This time around you’ll be hearing a lot more of his outstanding debut album Room For Squares as he takes to stages across the country. An experience he’s obviously looking forward to.

“You know I can’t get a feel for how people (in Australia) feel about the album yet, because I haven’t been around them long enough.”

Room For Squares has now been in the bag for almost 18 months, but here in Australia the album is still relatively fresh, only having been released mid year.

“To think that a record you made can still feel new this far down the track is unbelievable,” John muses. “I never really meant to assemble a record as much as I just sat down and wrote a bunch of songs. It kind of becomes a record, but I don’t really think in terms of ‘now I’m creating my next record’. I’m a writer, and these records are collections of works. I don’t write them for the sake of putting them on a record, you know.”

How did you get hooked up to release the record?

“I’d been playing shows for a while and got invited to go to South By Southwest, which is like a big magnet for industry folks to come and see you play. I guess they just got a taste of what I do. It’s really been very very slow in the way this is all going.”

Do you remember a point when you thought to yourself that this was it, you’re a professional musician now?

“I think that was when I got handed the record contract. It was very difficult for a couple of days. It was weird reading things in the contract like ‘throughout the universe’. The universe is very big. They own me through this big damn universe.”

So what’s someone from another planet going to think of what you’re doing?

“They’ll probably think I sound like Dave Matthews,” he chuckles. “For a while I tried to skip around it, ‘I’ve never heard Dave Matthews. Dave who?’. I’ve heard him, and I’m inspired by what he does, but I don’t want it to eclipse my own style. When I found out it wasn’t going to, I could turn around and go ‘hey, I like Dave Matthews’.”

What were your formative influences?

“Lots of things. The Police, Michael Jackson. Kind of anything that was on MTV in those early days. Kool & The Gang, Genesis, Lionel Richie, you know. It was awesome. I get serious shivers from that stuff. Those songs take you back to where you were when you first heard it.”

Is that in a sense why you write songs? To take you back to another time in your life?

“God, I hope so. Writing songs for me is to take myself to a place I can’t go currently. Songs like City Love is me wanting to go to New York City and fall in love there. To be a songwriter and musician at the same time you’re really subject to all kinds of changes. I’m not moody, but I’m into different moods to write songs. It’s powerful stuff. The stuff I’m writing now is more atmospheric.”

Having studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, it’s fair to say Mayer has some pretty decent musical chops up his sleeve. For the connoisseur, the cover of Room For Squares features a Novak fan neck guitar.

“You’re the first person that actually knows what it is,” he remarks. “They’re not hard to play at all. It’s an amazing instrument, and even after you play it you can still go back to a normal guitar. I didn’t own it when I made the record, but I wish I had. It would have been all over it.”