John Mayer's a stellar guitarist, but his songs are staid

YEAH but he's an amazing guitar player. T

hat's what people say whenever John Mayer is held accountable for his pillow-soft songcraft, the dull sentimentality of his lyrics, or that cuckoo-racist interview he gave to Playboy back in 2010. Knowing how to caress a Fender Stratocaster should not absolve a man of such party fouls, so I make this admission through clenched teeth: John Mayer is an amazing guitar player.

It's hard to hear it on his records, where his over-compressed solos might zip past your ears, regardless of how sensitively they've been articulated. Strangely, you can hear it in stunning detail inside a cavernous arena, like Washington's Verizon Center, where on Thursday evening Mayer repeatedly sent his most intimate gestures fluttering up toward the 400 level's cheapest seats. He knows how to play the guitar, but more importantly, he knows how to play an arena.

And he filled this one up despite the fact that his seventh studio album, "The Search for Everything," hasn't been released in its entirety. Instead, Mayer has chosen to roll out the 12-track album in truncated four-song "waves," with the final wave scheduled to crash on April 14. He's also chosen a sweeping title for a songbook that, so far, chronicles his break-up with pop superstar Katy Perry over a series of sleek R&B toe-tappings.

Meantime, Mayer has kept busy on the interview circuit, still doing damage control seven years after casually dropping the n-word in an interview with Playboy during which he also referred to his libido as a "white supremacist" and compared his anatomy to David Duke. Since then, we've been left to wonder how, among other things, John Mayer's freaky brain makes such un-freaky music.

That doesn't mean it isn't mesmerizing from time to time. On Thursday, Mayer played two paralyzing solos - one during the louche strut of "Vultures," another during a choppy acoustic rendition of "3x5." Both felt dizzyingly fast, breathtakingly delicate and entirely of Mayer's own invention. But just as he artfully undersold his virtuosity on the guitar, he often oversold the wistfulness in his voice, deploying his trademark sigh - the one that always makes him sound as if he's using his dying breath to practice a new pickup line.

It sounded as icky as ever, but if you stretched your ears, you might have heard a more fundamental human desire, a man committed to propagating the species at any cost. And while it feels odd to ponder whether there might be a cosmic sexuality secretly coursing through Mayer's music when there's already so much cornball sexiness slathered on the surface, it's important to remember that Mayer belongs to a proud lineage of schmaltz-shovelers - James Taylor, Sting - and that these soft-rock shovelers are often trying to bury something.

The most sexy-strange lyric to bubble up Thursday night came during "Love on the Weekend," a new song cut from a bolt of Fleetwood Mac-grade organza in which Mayer describes his love buzz as a "serotonin overflow." Crooning about neurochemistry felt like a step in the right direction, but if you heard Mayer recently tell Charlie Rose that his brain is like a "bingo cage," or if you read that profile in the New York Times where Mayer described tabloid attention as "a human-growth hormone," it's easy to wish that his gab-gift would spill onto to his lyric sheet. What if, instead of atoning for all of those old interviews with new interviews, Mayer chose to wrestle with his strangeness in song? Shouldn't his music be as weird as he is? Imagine a breezy, blue-eyed soul jam about battling the white supremacist beneath your zipper.

In the maestro's mind, he's already giving us as much as we can handle. Deep into Thursday's set list, Mayer gave a quick speech that suggested he thinks too little of his audience and too much of himself: "There's thousands and thousands of people here, and we're going all over the musical map: acoustic, blues, R&B," Mayer said to his flock. "And you guys have the breadth of heart and feeling to want to come and celebrate all of these songs. That's phenomenal. . . . We are now in uncharted territory for a performer and crowd."

In that moment, he sounded delusional. The territory Mayer had been covering all night was nothing if not well-charted, with more than a few of his bluesier solos sounding like they had been lifted out of '80s cop movies. Familiarity was paramount. Decorum was upheld. Mayer was a pleaser above all.

Maybe that counts for something. Life is weird, which makes constructing a musical world devoid of weirdness a formidable task. Is it an honorable task? So many of our greatest musicians made their magic by communing with the unknown - but during his time onstage Thursday night, Mayer seemed to be extinguishing the unknown. And he made it feel completely effortless. I still can't decide whether that's an accomplishment or a pity.