John Mayer’s ‘Drone Shot of My Yacht’ Becomes the Earworm of the Moment (Listen)

Chris Willman

1 April 2020 at 1:13 pm·3-min read

Songwriters are straining to meet the moment as the coronavirus crisis intensifies — and John Mayer has definitely met this one with a new song, “Drone Shot of My Yacht,” that captures all the angst felt by billionaires as they wait out the pandemic, adrift on the high seas.

Although it doesn’t mention anyone by name, the tune satirizes the widely mocked photograph David Geffen shared, presumably shot by a drone, of his ocean exile. And it might be the catchiest song you’ll hear all season — no amount of mental hand sanitizer will scrub this earworm from your head.

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The chorus: “Drone shot of my yacht / It’s all I got / I’m all alone on the water.” Verse: “Let me flex these specs / 456 feet, six or seven decks / And I know you all wanna stretch your necks / To see what I got on it / But I don’t even give a heck.”

Mayer premiered the song in the middle of his weekly live Instagram program Sunday, and it went over well enough that he released a minute-long version to his regular Instagram account.

On the Instagram show, which has alternately been known as “Current Mood” or “The Gentle Hours,” he introduced the song as part of a segment he said will be known as “Now Now,” which he said will be devoted to “whenever anybody tends not to understand the overall tenor of society right now of what we’re going through and gets called out for it.”

Said Mayer, “This weekend’s ‘Not Now’ goes to David Geffen, who posted an Instagram photo of himself on his boat saying he was isolated in the Grenadines. And I gotta tell you, I don’t know where were the Grenadines are. The most offensive thing to me in this post is assuming that I know where the Grenadines are.”

In the live show (which can be seen below — he sings and talks about the song between the 14- and 19-minute points), Mayer shares a few additional lines of what may be a longer song, like, “I bought that bitch in 2004 / I don’t need to take your … s— anymore.” He also threw in generous extra helpings of R&B melisma to round out his live rendition.

“Gotta get John Oates on that song,” he reads a viewer asking, reading comments off the screen. Mayer responds: “If anybody wants to cuts that song with me, it’d be really funny.” Make it so, the world commands.

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