#18 On Music

Or an ode to John Mayer, and reflections on living and being.

Image Credits: Siddarth RG, Siddarth’s Newsletter

This flash essay is part of a collaborative, constrained-writing challenge undertaken by some members of the Bangalore Substack Writers Group. This month, we used the prompt, ‘MUSIC’. At the bottom of this snippet, you’ll find links to other essays by fellow writers.

A few Sundays back, I attended a John Mayer concert in Abu Dhabi!¹

By chance, a colleague mentioned that he was performing that weekend. Even though the seating layout on my computer screen showed me just three white, empty dots in a sea of grey, I still mulled over it before booking the ticket on the morning of the concert day.

Despite furiously calculating the routes and planning to show up an hour and a half in advance, I had missed the first song by the time I made it. I ran to my seat to experience a surprisingly cosy, intimate vibe waiting for me. There he was, with his characteristic messy hair, in a navy shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Still looking not a day above 29, when he is actually going to turn 49 this year.

Even though all the posters had clearly mentioned that he was performing solo, a part of me still felt a bit betrayed for not getting the “John Mayer Experience” I had conjured up in my head, a leather-jacketed, power-packed medley of dizzyingly virtuosic, strat-fuelled blues.

I let my panic, disappointment and self-criticism for being late dissipate into the first song and by the end of the concert, I realized that I wouldn’t have wanted this experience to be different in any way.

Although he was performing solo, it felt like a misnomer in some ways. He was changing guitars after every two or three songs and, in a sense, they were his entire band, extensions of himself and his artistic vision.

“You see this little spot here?” he asked us, pointing to a small chipped-off portion on the body of his guitar. “It wasn’t there when I first bought it.”

“It reminds me of just how old I am,” he quipped.

In between songs, he also played some “blast from the past” clips going as far back as 25 years ago, around the time he released his debut album Room for Squares. Low-quality, early YouTube-esque videos where he seemed at times painfully self-conscious, at other times unskilled in his projection of youthful confidence, and yet powerful in their sincerity.

It slowly dawned on me just how important his music had been in shaping my life, especially in my young adult years. When my brother first introduced me to Why Georgia, I felt I now had a voice for the existential melancholy that comes with all the doubt and the uncertainty of a life yet to truly begin.

No Such Thing was once my anthem, my guiding star to someday prove to the world that I would no longer be that shy, awkward kid, but an insanely rich and widely respected novelist.

An older version of me would have given in to the deceptive voice of reason and not show up that night: It was too expensive, I had never travelled to Abu Dhabi alone, tomorrow was a workday and I would get home too late. And when I was scrambling to reach the venue on time, that version would have beaten himself up in a way that would have ruined the rest of the 86.5 minutes of this rare experience.

But as he played my anthem that night, it dawned on me we had both come full circle, a homecoming in its truest sense. In my case, it meant moving from Dubai to India and coming back again, and in the process, letting go of the self-flagellating, angry, and depressed inner voice to savour the here and now.

Which is why it did not matter whether I could sing every lyric word-for-word, or whether I was familiar with every song from his latest albums. I was finally comfortable in my skin, present for each moment, good or bad, to the fullest. And this was the reward meant to be coveted, not any outer marker of fame and success I had once conditioned myself to strive for.

Whether it was having this revelation amid tears of joy as he played No Such Thing, waiting in line for the bus back to Dubai, or sitting alone to a meal of daal and roti in an all-night restaurant at 2.30 AM, it finally dawned on me that:

I am invincible, as long as I am alive.

I sure am, John. Well all are.

Gratitude Eternal, from me to you, and the Universe.

For everything.

Thanks for reading all the way till the end! Here are other lovely takes on the theme of music by my fellow Bangalore Substackers. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

• DhvaniTaranga by Shwetha Harsha , Chutneymix

• Music for Mental Health by Shruti Soumya, Same Here

• The Singing Neighbour by Rakhi Kurup, Rakhi’s Substack

• How to build a time machine by Amit Charles

• Growing Up a Metalhead in Small-Town India by Rajat Gururaj, I came, I saw, I floundered

• Morning Raaga by Nidhishree Venugopal General in Her Labyrinth

1. Turns out it was postponed, twice! I didn’t know it then, but I guess in hindsight, it felt like the universe had manifested it for me.