Five CD's box set features four studio albums (Rooms for Squares, Heavier Things, Continuum, Battle Studies), and Try! live album featuring performances with Steve Mayer & Pino Palladino.Each studio album has bonus tracks/B-sides.
John Clayton Mayer is an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer. He was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and raised in nearby Fairfield. He attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, but disenrolled and moved to Atlanta in 1997 with Clay Cook. Together, they formed a short-lived two-man band called Lo-Fi Masters.
John Mayer found stardom the old-fashioned way. After building a live following in his adopted hometown of Atlanta, he took his solo acoustic act to Austin's annual South by Southwest festival, where he was signed by the Columbia subsidiary Aware, a label responsible for such college festival fare as Hootie & the Blowfish, Train, and Vertical Horizon. His second album, Room for Squares, eventually became a monster hit behind the single "No Such Thing," and Mayer expanded his live following nationwide, scoring especially big numbers with college coeds eager to trade in their Dave Matthews crushes for a younger, more charismatic model.
David Byrne took a spare, direct approach on his third song-based solo album, which lent his work an intimacy but did little to restore his commercial prospects, despite a first single, "Angels," that was a ringer for the Talking Heads song "Once in a Lifetime." In fact, the limited instrumentation and focus on Byrne's voice tended to create difficulties with his typically quirky lyrics – with the words in close-up, one wanted them to make some kind of sense…
John Mayer's 2013 album, the Americana-tinged Paradise Valley, is an introspective if somewhat more upbeat affair than his similarly country-inflected 2012 release, Born and Raised. With that album, Mayer was coming off a rough career patch that found him issuing a mea culpa for an infamously loose-lipped 2010 Rolling Stone interview. Making matters worse, in 2011 the singer/songwriter announced he would be going on extended hiatus from performing while he received treatment for granulomas found near his vocal cords. Subsequently, with Born and Raised, Mayer moved away from the commercial pop of 2010's Battle Studies and toward an intimate, largely acoustic, '70s Laurel Canyon-inspired sound with songs that featured plenty of apologetic soul-searching.
Longtime friends and collaborators Caetano Veloso and David Byrne joined forces for a special Carnegie Hall concert broadcast on National Public Radio in the spring of 2004. Eight years later, Live at Carnegie Hall is released, containing highlights from this stripped-down, primarily acoustic meeting of one of Tropicalia's biggest artists with one of the pillars of art rock. Sequenced in the order the concert was played, the disc begins with a solo set by Veloso ending with his cover of the Talking Heads' "The Revolution" to segue into Byrne's set. While not exactly a hushed affair, there's a quietly breezy feeling throughout the recording. Veloso's incredibly smooth voice is the definition of Brazilian pop: laid-back and welcoming at all times.