John Mayer Quits Twitter to Focus on Recording

John Mayer — who has entertained 3.7 million followers with barrages of Tweets like, "I just woke up from a dream about drinking water. When you get to live your dreams, your actual dreams are boring as shit" — unceremoniously deleted his Twitter account yesterday. A rep for Mayer tells Rolling Stone that Mayer quit the service because "a return to the studio is planned," presumably to record a follow-up his 2009 album Battle Studies.

Mayer isn't leaving social networking entirely. In fact, he now seems focused on Tumblr. Last week, he took to his account there to explain the new habit: “I had 3.3 million Twitter followers back in April when I announced that I'd be predominantly posting on Tumblr ... Five months later I have just passed 50,000 followers, a fraction of my Twitter base ... I will leave the opining up to you, but I think I made the right move. I now have an even larger Tumblr addiction but it's sort of like a book addiction, or a gambling addiction where you always walk away with the casino's money ... it’s one of those things you do all the time but isn't all that bad for you.”

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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