Good Love Is On the Way
In December 2007 John Mayer played three sets in one night at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles. The middle one — the trio set — is the one that lasts.
In December 2007, John Mayer played three sets in one night at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles — an acoustic set alone, a blues set with a trio, a full-band set. The film came out in 2008 as Where the Light Is. The middle set is the one that lasts.
By the time the cameras rolled, the public had mostly made up its mind about him. Somewhere around 2006 a version of John Mayer hardened in place — the tabloid one, the talk-show one — and it had almost nothing to do with the guitar player. I won’t argue the reputation was unfair. Some of it was earned. But the playing was real, and the playing is what got recorded that night.
“Good Love Is On the Way” is a song he wrote with the trio: Mayer on guitar, Steve Jordan on drums, Pino Palladino on bass. Those two names matter. Jordan played behind Keith Richards, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Don Henley, and never once tried to be the loudest thing in the room. Palladino took over the bass chair in The Who after John Entwistle died. That tells you the weight he can carry. Put those two behind a guitar player with something to prove and the floor holds.
The trio set had nothing around it. No string section, no production scaffolding, no hits it was obligated to play. Three musicians, and Mayer playing like the cameras weren’t there.
The song opens on a riff that owes a clear debt to Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Mayer has never pretended otherwise. He learned from Vaughan the way you learn from a teacher you believe in — openly, with the influence on the surface where anyone can see it. When Jordan settles in and Palladino finds the line underneath, the song stops being about anything except three people who have played together long enough to stop thinking and start listening.
“Good love is on the way, coming to me, coming to stay.”
It is not a complicated lyric. It doesn’t need to be. The words point forward — something good is coming, not here yet, still moving — and everything around the words does the rest. The bends Mayer works into the verses. The notes he lets sit at the edge of in-tune just long enough to mean something.
There is a kind of playing that lives in a room with three people and almost never survives a studio. The studio wants control, a version that holds still long enough to be captured. A trio wants to chase. Jordan drops a fill where one wasn’t planned. Palladino slides up to a note he found a second ago. Mayer hears both and changes his phrase in the middle of it. What the Nokia Theatre recording holds is not the finished thought. It’s the thinking.
The version on the record runs just over four minutes, which is almost short for what it’s doing. It comes in, makes its case, and gets out before the chase becomes a demonstration. That restraint is Jordan’s. You can hear him keep the song tethered even as it opens up in the back half — it never floats off into a guitar showcase.
The record came out in 2008, in the middle of the years when opinion on Mayer had curdled into something between an eye-roll and real irritation. Some of that was deserved. None of it touched the music. The music asks one question: did he show up that night.
He showed up.
And the song he brought asks even less of you. Good love is on the way — not here, not promised by morning, just coming. Still in transit. Pointed in the right direction and willing to keep moving.
Three sets in one night. The middle one is the one still moving.
