Recorded at Loho, New York, New York; Sunny Acre, Easton, Maryland; 33 & 1/3, Brooklyn, New York; Applehead, Woodstock, New York; Media Mix Studios, Nashville, Tennessee.

"Your Body Is A Wonderland" won the 2003 Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.

John Mayer was nominated for the 2003 Grammy Award for Best New Artist.

After making minor waves with his 1999 debut, Inside Wants Out, John Mayer hired veteran producer John Alagía (a longtime associate of the Dave Matthews Band) to lace his first major-label effort with commercial appeal. Released in September 2001, Room for Squares proved to be a savvy, well-timed album, quietly heralding the end of teen pop's glory days with nuanced wordplay, a relaxed gait, and intricate (although nevertheless accessible) songwriting. Songs like "No Such Thing" and "Neon" mixed jazz chords with digestible choruses, fashioning a sort of brainy, college-educated pop hybrid that found a home amongst discerning listeners and mainstream fans alike. Of course, it didn't hurt that Mayer also loaded the album with more straightforward numbers -- particularly "Your Body Is a Wonderland," a bubbling piece of bedroom pop that helped swell his female audience. Mayer's heralded guitar solos and bluesy, Stevie Ray Vaughan-styled flourishes were sorely absent from the mix, though, as he initially limited the bulk of his fretwork to the acoustic guitar. It would take a jam-friendly concert album -- 2003's Any Given Thursday -- to introduce the breadth of Mayer's axeman skills to the public, but Room for Squares still provides a nice introduction to the songwriter's catalog, highlighting his blend of collegiate pop/rock and sensitive acoustics while only hinting at the eclectic, genre-hopping chameleon he would later become. ~ Andrew Leahey

Somewhere around the turn of the 21st century, guys like David Gray (who'd already been laboring in obscurity for quite a while) and Five For Fighting made it hip (and profitable) to be a sensitive singer-songwriter for the first time since the '70s. Along those lines, John Mayer appeals to the kind of youngsters who are embarrassed by their parents' Dan Fogelberg collection but equally turned off by vociferous gangstas and misanthropic heavy rockers. ROOM FOR SQUARES (whose very title, not to mention Mayer's studied regular-guy cover pose, bespeaks the revenge of the nerds) accordingly trades in acoustic guitar-based folk-rock tempered with just enough 21st-century freshness to keep its practitioner in the Billboard charts (and his listeners' hearts). That's not to say Mayer's music is calculated; he's got a real feel for melody and a distinctive lyrical style. He also managed to be in the right place at the right time, and that's the key to any pop success.