Songfacts®:

• Many young, struggling musicians run into challenges on their steep climbs that make them question their life choices. We imagine minor league baseball players do to. One of those moments triggered John Mayer's song "Why Georgia."
  
  After growing up in Fairfield, Connecticut and doing two semesters at the Berklee College Of Music, he moved to Atlanta in 1997 to pursue his dream of making music. This meant playing shows anywhere he could in an effort to build an audience, even bookstores.
  
  One of these shows was at a Borders, a now-defunct chain of bookstores that was popular in the late '90s but fell under the weight of the internet. (Mayer jokes that you can't really call it a "show," more of a musical exhibition taking place next to a giant glass of muffins. He also says for payment, he had his choice of $50 cash or a $70 gift certificate. He took the cash.) This Borders was in Marietta, Georgia, about an hour's drive up I-285.
  
  He was en route when he realized he didn't have his guitar. Traffic was backed up in the other direction so he couldn't turn back. Instead, he called his friend Shawn Mullins, who you'll remember for his 1998 hit "Lullaby," and borrowed a guitar from him.
  
  "I was about an hour late when I showed up at the bookstore," Mayer explained when introducing the song at a concert. "I had this piece that I came up with only a couple days before. I started playing it and I started writing the song. It went:
  
  I'm driving up 285
  And there's so much traffic
  That's the reason I was late
  
  That's where the whole song comes from. The chorus was a leftover part that I'd written when I was still in Berklee. That song sucked so I did a little swap job."
• "Why Georgia" was released as a single from Mayer's 2001 debut album, Room For Squares. It wasn't a hit, peaking at #102 in the US, but it holds a special place in his heart and he's performed it live more than any other song in his catalog. The song reminds him of a time when he was struggling to get by but found a way to push through.
• Mayer's days playing bookstores ended when he landed a deal with Columbia Records. It wasn't so much the local support that impressed the label, but the heat he was getting on the internet, which was just starting to become a major marketing tool for music in the late '90s and early '00s. Mayer had one of the better websites out there and made his music available for free. By the time his first album was released in 2001, it was clear there was a market for what he had to offer, and indeed, his first two singles - "No Such Thing" and "Your Body Is A Wonderland" - were hits.