John Mayer

The video for “Who Says,” the gentle first single from John Mayer’s forthcoming album, “Battle Studies,” rolls along as genially as the tune itself.

It’s 4:59 a.m., Mayer, looking more and more like a GQ model, is coming home from a long night out in Manhattan, and it’s time to spend some time “me in my house alone.”  As he strums his guitar, he flashes back to the evening behind him, reliving his time clubbing, eating out, performing stand up at a comedy club and hanging at a  carnival (because you can find them on every street corner all year round in NYC, right? Maybe this was filmed during the Feast of San Gennaro). He’s surrounded by gorgeous girls and gals. It’s basically “Sex in the City”—John Mayer style.

The stoner references (He starts almost every verse with “Who says I can’t get stoned) are played down, but they aren’t out of the picture. In one scene, a woman Mayer is dining with lights up, but it’s unclear if it’s a cigarette or a joint. Another scene flashes on a storefront called “Half-baked.”  Mayer has said that the song isn’t about getting stoned on pot, it’s about getting stoned on playing his guitar... and he does plenty of that in the clip. We still wager that MTV and VH1 block out the cig. He manages to get his point across just fine.