The John Mayer Story:

How Inside Wants Out was made:

I guess you could say the "big" news for Orphan Studio is that the hot new teen sensation John Mayer has re-released his 1999 CD Inside Wants Out, produced and engineered by Glenn Matullo at Orphan Studio. During John’s 2-year rise to stardom, Orphan Studio has been flooded with emails and phone calls wanting to know how to get a copy of that CD. Well, now you can get your own copy at John Mayer's Website . A lot of fans also wanted information about the CD and John.

So here is how Inside Wants Out was made:

John moved to Atlanta sometime in 1998. One night he showed up at Eddie’s Attic, a great place for singer/songwriters to perform. It was Monday night, the famous Open Mic Night, and I was working at the door checking in the players. John, and his then partner Clay Cook, played that night. After the show I asked them if they wanted to make a record. They said "of course", and plans were made to make the first ‘Lo-Fi Masters’ CD (that’s what they called themselves). A month or two later we started recording on a Friday. Basic tracks were to be recorded that weekend at Full Moon Studios in Athens, GA. The overdubs were then going to be done at Orphan Studio the following week. The weekend recording went very well and when Monday came, John and Clay informed me that they broke up. I still don’t know exactly why. They were a great duo. Their voices blended well, their harmonies were amazing, and they wrote some great songs together. For those of you who don’t know, Clay co-wrote a fair amount of songs on both of John’s CD’s, including the smash hit, ‘No Such Thing.’ Anyway, the ‘Lo-Fi Masters’ CD was scrapped and John started playing solo. After shows John really need a CD to sell, but he was pretty broke at the time and couldn’t afford to go into the studio. I suggested that we just start recording during some off-hours at my studio. John had a part-time job with the company that shared my suite, so he was around a lot. We recorded at night, on the weekends, whenever I had time. I told John I would just suspend my studio time payments until he started selling some CDs. We soon realized that a song like ‘Back To You’ really needed drums. I don’t record drums at my studio, it’s just a little too small. So Southern Living At its Finest Studios graciously let us record drums there, for free! They are longtime friends of mine and helped out in a lot of the Shawn Mullins recordings I have done. The song ‘Quiet’ came out of John one late night as we were getting ready to leave the studio. I had one microphone open in the booth and I heard him playing. I asked him what song it was. He said it was new, and I said we had to record it. I just pushed record, didn’t really even adjust the microphone. So ‘Quiet’ was done in one take with one microphone. ‘NEON 12:37 AM’ was just a fun experiment. The drum and bass tracks came from the Full Moon sessions that we did with the ‘Lo-Fi Masters’ band. John just wanted to play guitar over those tracks and it turned into a fun jam with some crazy sounds and FX added. When we finished recording the rest of the songs, we wanted a fresh set of ears to mix them for us, so I asked Russ Fowler. He mixed Shawn Mullins Soul’s Core CD. We went back to Southern Living Studios for the mix. They gave us a great discount on studio time and we mixed the CD in 2 and 1/2 days. John still had no money to pay for Russ or the mix studio, so I paid for them. He also needed to get the CD pressed, so I paid for the first pressing of a thousand copies. It took 2 years and a lot of phone calls, but I eventually got paid back for my initial investment in Inside Wants Out. John went on to sell 4 thousand copies independently and then it went out of print. John said he would never re-release Inside Wants Out on a major level. Well, lucky for all his fans, he changed his mind. So that’s how Inside Wants Out got made…

I am telling this story for those of you who don’t know me, or anything about my studio. To date, there has been little written about Inside Wants Out, beside the fact that John released it independently in 1999. If fans have any other questions about the CD, don’t hesitate to email me. Please, no phone calls…Thanks!