The artwork and marketing campaign for John Mayer‘s new album, “Sob Rock,” features the sort of imagery that pulls you in. That’s because its 1980s-inspired look spurs more questions than answers — is the music retro or just the visuals? Are you meant to laugh or groan? Is the homage related to a specific release from the past?
Mayer hasn’t revealed much about the look of “Sob Rock,” but he has discussed inspiration for the songs. On a Clubhouse talk the eve of the album’s release, he name-checked Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” (1984), Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson’s “Say Say Say” (1983) and Moody Blues’ “Your Wildest Dreams” (1986) as influencing the instrumentation and vocal stylings of such tracks as “Shouldn’t Matter But It Does,” “Why You No Love Me” and “Shot in the Dark.”
It all works with the tag lines seen on billboards and print ads promoting the album using verbiage like “On Columbia Records and Tapes” and slogans like “Life Is Hard. Rock Soft.”
Columbia Records marketing executive Betsy Whitney says that, while fans have tried to connect the dots, there’s not a specific piece of source material. Rather, the colors and stylized fonts were crafted to allude to the time period that Mayer has said gave him comfort in the days of the pandemic. Whitney, who has worked on projects for Columbia artists like Bruce Springsteen, Celine Dion, HAIM, and Leon Bridges, describes this as an “amalgamation of all those influences and all those things that John loved in 1988 coming to life in the marketing of this campaign.”
Still, there seem to be some correlations between “Sob Rock” and key art from the past. The “American Gigolo” poster comes to mind, as does the color palette for “Miami Vice.”
.
