Moving music along

John Mayer won’t go ballistic if he hears you’ve outgrown his “Room for Squares” CD.

Or that you’re so over his Grammy-winning hit “Daughters.” Or that you’d rather go deaf than hear “Your Body Is A Wonderland” again.

Mayer feels the same way. Just two CDs and three years into a multiplatinum recording career, he talks about his past hits with disdain, like an embarrassing high school yearbook photo.

“I’m done with acoustic guitar, balladeering, I’m done with acoustic groove. … I’ve sucked the flavor out of it,” moans the boyish singer-songwriter.

If earnest crooning and guitar strumming over mellow grooves defined Mayer’s musical adolescence, he’s grown into to more substantial, mature fare with his latest passions: funk, soul and, most notably, the blues.

No longer is James Taylor his model. Now Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles and Buddy Guy are the musical heroes Mayer hopes to emulate as he embarks on his new mission: trying to make the rest of America fall as hard for the blues as he has.

“I believe that people could love blues more than I believe anything in my life,” says Mayer, sitting on his sleek couch in his even sleeker Soho apartment.

“The problem is who’s been playing it, what’s the sentiment behind it, what’s the need behind it,” he says. “Most people who play blues … they’re playing for themselves, and I’m thinking about how to get blues to other people.

“And that’s through pop music. (Eric) Clapton does it, and he makes me want to tear my hair out because I want to do it, too.”

While he may not be on the same level as the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, the 28-year-old Mayer is impressive nonetheless on his new live CD, “Try! The John Mayer Trio Live In Concert.”

The album encapsulates Mayer’s musical journey over the past year – much of it spent on the road performing material like Ray Charles’ “I Got A Woman” and Mayer’s own soulful compositions with two veteran musicians, drummer Steve Jordan and bassist Pino Palladino.

His next studio CD, “Continuum,” is due out next year and continues in the bluesy vein.

Mayer says his previous albums, 2001’s “Room for Squares” and 2003’s “Heavier Things,” didn’t reflect that blues influence because he didn’t think he was at a point musically where he could do it properly.

So he focused on the kind of emotive singer-songwriter odes that were palatable to a wide audience. His two major-label albums sold about 5 million copies combined and earned him three Grammys, including song of the year for the sentimental track “Daughters.”

Yet the more popular he became, the more ubiquitous his kind of music became, as soundalikes flooded the scene. At the same time, Mayer began to grow more disenchanted with his best-selling works. Playing them night after night made them sound dated, he says.

“They become relics,” Mayer says. “And I’m too young to be a nostalgia band, I’m too young to remind somebody of 2002. That’s not fun.”

But ditching the kind of music that made him a household name for the blues – a genre that for many fans is the very definition of musical nostalgia – might seem foolhardy. Even Mayer declares that the “art form is pretty dead right now.”

But he believes he can bring the music to the masses by tailoring it to a pop audience.

“I’m not the best person who has ever done it. But I’m the most popular person who has ever done it in the last 10 years,” he declares. “That’s my duty.”

Listening to a young white kid from Connecticut describe himself as the savior of a genre that’s been around for close to a century might sound like the ultimate form of hubris to blues aficionados.

But Mayer is careful to point out that he’s not a blues master, just perhaps the right person to give it a more popular face – or as he says, to move the music along.

“I’ll take some (stuff) from people saying this is a watered-down version of other things that you can find. True. ‘Why would you listen to this when you can just listen to B.B. King and it will be better?’ True,” he says.

“But I have the ability to bring this music across to people with a certain flavor that is more digestible to people. So yes, I’m more watered down than B.B. King, but maybe that’s what sometimes people want to take in, to be able to take it in.”