John Mayer added an important stop to his Solo tour.
“A great big, wonderful Happy Birthday to my dad who turns 96!” Mayer captioned an Instagram post on Oct. 11. “I just surprised him with a visit on my way to Nashville. Feeling very blessed.”
In the picture, John, 45, is shown kneeling next to his father, Richard Mayer, who is beaming.
Eagle-eyed fans were quick to spot John’s sixth studio album on Richard’s bookshelf.
“He has the Paradise Valley CD sitting right next to him,” one person wrote.
Added another, “Paradise Valley CD at the ready next to the humidifier.”
Richard worked as a high school principal in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for more than four decades. He and John’s mother, Margaret Mayer, an English teacher, divorced in 2009. The former couple are also parents of sons Ben and Carl. John is the baby of the family.
“My dad was a piano player,” John told Andy Cohen in 2021, according to People. “He would play at the Rotary club, and he would play off the page. He was a written music player and … I didn’t know how to read music. I still don’t know if he quite gets how I’ve made it if I can’t read music.”
Richard confessed he initially had concerns when John announced he was pursuing a career in music.
“My experience in music was everybody had a job. We were teachers, plumbers, and on the weekends we’d play,” Richard recalled while speaking to People in 2007. “So it boiled down to saying, ‘John, you have to have a Plan B.’ And John said, ‘I don’t have a Plan B. This is it.’ Trying to get him ‘within the lines’ — I failed and he won. And he was right.”
In the same interview, John called Richard, “the most upstanding man I’ve ever met.”