Album Review : Paradise Valley – John Mayer

After having a long list of albums I've wanted to review, I chose to start somewhere and am going with John Mayer’s 6^th outing – Paradise Valley. I rather enjoyed the opening song of Wildfire and had a lot of expectations from the rest of the album. Unfortunately, considering the space that John Mayer has created in my books of being an artist who excels with each passing album, I found the album to be a letdown of sorts.

I've heard and reheard the album at least 5 times in the last one week and I just don’t find a single tune that I can remember instantly and want to come back home and learn on the guitar. With songs like Gravity, Vultures, Daughters and more to his credit, I expected a lot more from Mayer on this outing. I honestly don’t understand Mayer’s pet-peeve of having his current girlfriends sing on his albums. It was Taylor Swift on Battle Studies and Katy Perry (on Who you love) on Paradise Valley. I guess it’s one of those things you can get away with if you’re at the level of John Mayer.

Most of the songs felt like what was left over during the song-writing process of Born and Raised. The previous outing of Mayer was a move away from his blues avatar and had a lazy country ‘listen to my life story’ sort of feel to it, and I loved it. Mayer has tried to recreate the same in Paradise Valley, but falls short. The song writing in bits and pieces on a couple of songs was good, most notably on Dear Marie (which I assume is about his first real love), Wildfire and  On the Way Home. Mayer also does an enjoyable cover of J.J Cale’s Call Me the Breeze which is poignant considering J.J Cale passed away recently. Talk about timing.

I’m giving the album 2 out of 5 stars. It’s an easy lazy listen that doesn't really have you eager to want to listen to it again. Paradise Valley offers nothing new to listeners but just might satisfy the appetite of the really-hard-core John Mayer fan. To me, Mayer’s benchmark will continue to be the Continuum album.