When John Mayer talks, he fixes you with a steely sniper's stare and speaks with absolute certainty. That's not to say that he has all the answers. You can hear twenty-something doubt in songs like "83" ("These days I wish I was six again") and his current hit "No Such Thing," where he yearns to have old high school pals share his realization that "There's no such thing as the real world."

"It's strange to think that soon as you become cognizant [of the world] you're in school and in a regimen," he explains. "The minute you're 18 years old you're out of it. There's this delayed growth that happens. That's what 'No Such Thing' is about. You have all this intelligence but you still don't know what you're going to do with it."

Formalized education isn't the answer to life quandaries, suggests Mayer. "It's such a strange concept that you can go to school and develop yourself for 15 years, but can be completely lost." He speaks from experience. The songs Mayer sings in that summer breeze of a voice on Room for Squares, are, as "Why Georgia" puts it, the product of a "quarter-life crisis" that struck after he dropped out of the Berklee College of Music in 1998.

"I couldn't keep up with the curriculum," he says. "I knew that going into it, but I was tempted so much by the idea of being in Boston. I took two years off of high school and honed my musical skills at my local Mobil station. It became a bargain with myself: 'I'll go to school as long as I can be in Boston.' But I couldn't keep up, so I dropped out."

A weighty decision like that doesn't come without costs. "When I moved out of college, I felt this emotional debt," Mayer explains. "When you get out of school, everything seems crisp. But then you start slowly tearing away at that with the choices you make. I thought, 'Okay, I went from high school to college. But I dropped out of college and moved to Atlanta. Now I'm living alone …' It's that feeling that the thread that connects you to when you were a kid is broken. You're like, 'Where am I?'"

Mayer's compass continues to be his love of music. He began learning the guitar in earnest when as a teenager he first heard Stevie Ray Vaughan. "Probably because I didn't smoke pot, I became the sensible Jimi Hendrix," he jokes. "Excuse me while I kiss the sky responsibly." After moving to Atlanta, he honed his craft in local clubs, recorded his 1999 independent release Inside Wants Out, and then fleshed out the songs for his 2001 major label debut Room for Squares.

"I like making records where there's not a lot of pretense," he admits of his revisionist recording methods. "Once you artistically operate out of fear in any way, you tax yourself until you have the most banal thing in the world. I'm glad we got to record Room for Squares with the budget and the resources that we had. The project was approached really simply."

Mayer has also taken a levelheaded approach to success. When Room for Squares didn't immediately take off, the label decided to remix it and add strings. For his part, the singer embarked on his first nationwide tour. It's been a slow and steady process that he wholly endorses.

"You always have these dreams of getting this big check and then tooling around in a car that's brand new the night you get your deal," he admits. "But some great people around me said, 'That's not what you want. You need to stay close to the ground and play music.' I'm so blessed that everything I've done has been so gradual. It's had the right equilibrium."

Living out of the back of a van is, admittedly, far different from taking the bus home from the club every night. Is he intimidated by the notion of seducing America? "Staying out on the road all year is really scary," Mayer confesses. "But the concept of playing tomorrow night and the night after that is just fine."

That kind of simplicity also spills into his artistic self-perception. "I'm a songwriter," says Mayer, hitting another bull's-eye. "Songwriters are born to write songs. But sometimes the music industry only expects 12 songs out of a songwriter every three or four years. If we're supposed to write songs, then we should be doing that more. This isn't the last record I'm ever going to be able to write. Although it might be my last if I have to wait three or four years to make another record!"