The 45-year-old musician dropped the popular song as a single off his debut studio album Room for Squares, and it went on to become a smash hit, charting on the Billboard Hot 100 for 29 weeks and even earning Mayer a Grammy Award in 2003. For nearly twenty years, Mayer’s fans have been left wondering who the famed song is about, especially since he’s been known for dating a string of A-list women, including Jennifer Aniston, Jessica Simpson, Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, among other celebrities he’s been linked to over the years. But the guitarist cleared up all the speculation during a recent appearance on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast on Wednesday, Dec. 21, where he revealed that the song actually isn’t about a famous person at all. “That was about my first girlfriend,” he clarified during his conversation with Cooper. “That was about the feeling, which I think was already sort of nostalgic. I was 21 when I wrote that song and I was nostalgic for being 16.” At the time the song was released, Mayer was dating Jennifer Love Hewitt, which caused the public to speculate that she was the woman behind the song’s mysterious lyrics, an idea that the guitarist says was conjured up by the media. “That’s one of those things where people just sort of formed that idea,” he said. “It gets reinforced over the years.” In fact, at the time he wrote the soon-to-be-hit, he hadn’t ever even come face to face with a celebrity, since he was just starting out his career at that time. “I had never met a celebrity when I wrote that song,” he admitted on Wednesday’s podcast episode. Mayer’s appearance on Call Her Daddy was part of the podcast’s first-ever holiday special. At another point in the conversation, the “New Light” singer confessed that he is no longer dating at all as part of a major lifestyle switch he’s made since abstaining from alcohol. “Dating is no longer a codified activity for me. It doesn’t exist in a kind of…it’s not patterned anymore,” he explained. “I don’t really date—I don’t think that I have to, to be quite honest.” Mayer has previously revealed that he hasn’t had a drink since 2016, when a six-day hangover made him reevaluate his drinking habits. “I quit drinking like six years ago, so I don’t have the liquid courage [to date]. I just have dry courage,” he added.
