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Now that I have a little over 3 hours of sleep under my belt, I'll elaborate a little more…

I came from the Marc Broussard show last night and the timing worked out almost perfectly. Marc finished about the time I left to go to this show. As I walked up to the Mercury, there was this guy and these 2 girls in front of me. There was nothing posted outside of the venue (there is a sign typically posted outside with info for the evening) about John playing and these 3 people asked the bouncer if anyone was playing and he said there was, but he was being coy about it for sure. The guy asked the bouncer who was playing and he said this singer-songwriter guy named John Mayer and their faces all lit up. It was definitely a random find for them, which was awesome. As Pat mentioned earlier, that is the awesome thing about NYC (and I'm sure LA too). Lots of cool random stuff happens here with little to no notice and sometimes you get lucky with those situations and sometimes you don't. When you do though, it feels like scratching off a lottery ticket and winning a lot more than $1.

What was so awesome about last night to me personally, and I'm sure Jocelyn, Pat and anyone else who was lucky enough to find John's music early on can attest to this, but last night was just really refreshing. Having seen JM play in smaller venues in the distant past, then make the transition to big venues and then seeing him back in a small venue is just really cool. I have a lot of fond memories from those days and it was just cool to reminisce. I felt the same way after seeing the Eddie's shows too, but even that was almost 3 years ago now, which is absolutely crazy! It was really cool to walk in and see John on stage (before his set had even started), tuning his own guitar and mic checking with the house sound engineer as if he was any other artist that was playing at the Mercury Lounge

Most of the good banter stuff was covered by Jocelyn or Pat. I feel like they hit on a lot of the key highlights too, but I'll reiterate some and touch on a few other things…

a.) "I'm On Fire" was such an awesome song to open with. I'm not a diehard Springsteen fan, but I do like The Boss and that has always been 1 of my favorite songs of his and I think of all the songs John has ever covered over the years, I think it's one of, if not the best. I think he just kills it and last night was a full-version.

b.) John was doing some looping stuff last night, which was cool because obviously he doesn't use loops on stage when he's playing with a band. I think loops make perfect sense (no pun intended) when an artist plays solo.

c.) "Taking on Water" was awesome. I was not previously fortunate enough to see any of the shows where this was played, but the song is a keeper. It sounded really good last night and the room was really quiet so you could hear everything perfectly.

d.) I agree 100% with Pat about "Who Did You Think I Was?" It is admittedly not 1 of my favorite songs of John's, but last night, it was absolutely smoking. It sounded really good. I liked it a lot better than I normally do.

e.) "All We Ever Do Is Say Goodbye" or "Goodbye" or whatever the title ends up being was the highlight of the evening for me. John prefaced the song by saying it wasn't finished, but I don't think anyone would've noticed either way. There's just something really special about that song. I think it's because musically, it's so different than anything else I've heard from John. The lyrics are great too. And I still think it's a cross between the Beatles and Ryan Adams.

f.) "Gravity" was an awesome way to close the show. Definitely a lot of cool things going on musically with the looping and the soloing.

g.) After the show was over, John didn't run off stage nor did he have someone escort him off. He sat there, like most musicians that play there, and unplugged his equipment and packed it up. After, he walked off stage and greeted people.

h.) I would've loved to have known what the demographics of this show were (in terms of how people found out about the show), but no real way of knowing.

As I said before, the whole evening really was like a time travel back to 2001, at least for me. The only difference being that John is 50X the musician and performer now with even better songs. Anyone else who had the opportunity to attend last night (or any prior/future) shows like this is damn lucky. Myself included.