“It was one of the strangest, most beautiful, serendipitous moments”: The John Mayer song that features a cameo from Prince’s guitar

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John Mayer has recalled how he once crossed paths with one of Prince’s guitars – and ended up using it on one of his records.

The PRS-wielding hitmaker has given CBS Sunday Morning an access-all-areas tour of Chaplin Recording Studios, which is part of a history-steeped Hollywood lot he recently co-purchased with film director McG. They want to help preserve and celebrate L.A’s rich cultural history, with the grounds hosting film, television, and music recording studios.

Mayer recorded his 2021 solo album Sob Rock there, as well as 2018’s smash single, New Light, which also featured on the LP. It isn't just the Silver Sky that you can hear on that track, though...

“It was a pretty big hit for me,” Mayer says of New Light. “I remember being here. Someone had brought Prince's guitar. This was after Prince had passed away and someone had brought by his guitar, and I went, ‘We’ll put it on this song.’

“So there’s a part of this song, in the bridge, where I'm standing here playing one of Prince's guitars,” he adds. “That was cool.”

Speaking of the track in 2018, while he sadly didn’t clarify which guitar it was, Mayer did speak about how the guitar entered his orbit.

“It was an incredible day, because we were working on this part of the song, which was definitely Prince-tastic, and the guitar magically came across the table in the studio from a friend,” he says. “It just appeared, for an hour. We didn’t know it was coming. It was one of the strangest, most beautiful, serendipitous moments.

“We sort of got into the spirit of the way Prince would’ve done it. So we plugged it into an API, put a little compressor on it – so that little bit of the song is direct input, I’m not even plugged into an amp.”

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Now, the question of the day is, which of Prince's guitars did Mayer actually use on New Light?

Could it have been the infamous Yellow Cloud guitar that recently sold as part of the historic Jim Irsay Collection auction recently? After all, in 2019, Irsay did lend Mayer Jerry Garcia's Tiger – which also sold at that same auction earlier this month – for a Dead & Company show.

Irsay had purchased Prince's infamous Yellow Cloud guitar in 2016, so it wouldn't be outrageous to hypothesize that that was the guitar we hear on New Light...

In related news, Mayer has opened up about his insecurities about playing alongside his idol, Bob Weir, in Dead & Company, and recently said he isn't in a hurry to finish the successor to Sob Rock.