When “Your Body Is a Wonderland” was released in 2002, it won John Mayer a Grammy and made him a bona fide rock star. The song also inspired countless theories over who it was about — which he’s now clarified once and for all.
“That was about my first girlfriend,” Mayer told Alex Cooper, a co-host of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, on an episode Wednesday. “I was 21 when I wrote that song, and I was nostalgic for being 16.”
Cooper said she always thought the song, which charted on the Billboard Hot 100 for 29 weeks and peaked at No. 18, was about a specific celebrity. Many fans certainly assumed the same, with some wagering that it was about Mayer’s ex-girlfriend Jennifer Love Hewitt.
“No, that’s one of those things where people just sort of formed that idea,” Mayer told Cooper about the celebrity theories. “It gets reinforced over the years. No, no, no — I had never met a celebrity when I wrote that song.”
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In the past, Mayer regularly graced the tabloids for a love life that at various points included entertainers like Katy Perry, Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Aniston.
This week’s interview noted that “womanizer” came to be a term applied to the rock star. “That is what that is,” Mayer told Cooper.
In 2010, he told Rolling Stone that his ideal woman had to have a “beautiful vagina” and told Playboy that Simpson was “sexual napalm.”
But in a 2017 article entitled “John Mayer Knows He Messed Up. He Wants Another Chance,” Mayer told The New York Times that the “double-headed dragon” of those 2010 interviews led him to reevaluate his behavior.
“Dating is no longer a codified activity for me,” he said to Cooper this week, suggesting that the change is related to his recent teetotalism.
At a show in March, Mayer said on stage that he wants people to stop telling him to settle down and start a family, according to Page Six. He added that he was “doing fine” on his own and now sleeps “next to a row of pillows” — which don’t “resent or hate me or bring me down.”