John Mayer Explains How Drake Indirectly Helped Him Quit Drinking

Singer John Mayer has been two years sober, but what led him to finally stop drinking?

Mayer has revealed that it has something to do with Drake's 30th birthday party in 2016, which he didn't remember much of until the next time he saw the rapper. John says in a new interview with Complex magazine, “I have the most amazing last-night-of-my-life-drinking story… I made quite a fool of myself. I was doing a show with Dave Chappelle, and Drake was in the audience. Drake came up, he said hello. And I hadn't seen him since his birthday. He reminded me — well, he didn't really remind me, he told me for the first time 'cause I was pretty far gone, it was the last night I had ever had a drink — that when I said goodbye to him, and was about to leave the club and go into the street, I put my arms out in front of him and I said, 'Remember me, and remember this,' and just walked out. Apparently it was like, what did he just say?”

After the birthday bash, Mayer experienced a hangover that lasted nearly a week. He said, “It took me weeks to stop doing this every morning I woke up. And then I had a conversation with myself. I remember where I was. I was in my sixth day of the hangover. That's how big the hangover was.”

Mayer had an epiphany on his sixth day, saying, “I looked out the window and I went, 'Okay, John, what percentage of your potential would you like to have? Because if you say you'd like 60, and you'd like to spend the other 40 having fun, that's fine. But what percentage of what is available to you would you like to make happen? There's no wrong answer. What is it?' I went, '100.'”

As for what happened when he decided to get sober, Mayer revealed, “That next year, I did four tours, I was in two bands, I was happy on airplanes. So what happens when you stop drinking? The level feels like boredom at first. But if you stick with it, the line straightens out and it goes kind of low. You're like, 'Oh, I'm not having these high highs.' But if you work, you can bring the whole line up.”

He emphasized on giving up alcohol, “It's the most personal thing to people. If I were to tell other people how they could do it, it just is so particular to your own spirit and your own psychology that it's almost impossible to develop one way of explaining it to someone else. You have to fight really hard to look at it from a critical point of view because it's constantly pushed on you. Every Friday and Saturday, on social media, there is enabling going on for drinking. What if I woke up every morning on Saturday and Sunday and put my feet on the ground and I just went 'not hungover' and put it on social media every day? That would be an influence on people because I think you forget that's an option. If you look at drinking the way you would look at anything else, which is risk-reward, what am I giving up? What am I getting? It's some of the worst odds that ever existed…”