When I was a very little girl, before John Mayer was born, I lived in a very strict religious environment in Amelia, Ohio. I wasn’t allowed to see television, listen to a radio, or look at billboard signs on the highways. I taught myself to read from the Hebrew Bible because they showed me my name there and I wanted to be able to read it. And like Joan of Arc was accused of in her trials, I was also not allowed to wear pants or any “boy” clothing, nor ever cut my hair. The only pop music album I was allowed to own but told I could only listen to one side of it was Neil Diamond’s single “Shilo". (The B-side was “Red, Red Wine” which also happens to be in the verse about my name.)
Neil Diamond’s song “Shilo” is about an imaginary friend:
“Shilo, when I was young —
I used to call your name
When no one else would come,
Shilo, you always came
And we'd play ...”
I first came to know John on his Battle Studies Tour in 2010 in the moment when he asked at an ASCAP Expo for people to write him more honestly on Tumblr in April. We had seen each other for the first time just a few weeks earlier at his show in Vancouver.
I was overwhelmingly compelled to reach out to him in the hurricane onslaught of the media reprimanding him for flamboyantly deflecting false stories being pushed to the press by a young, manipulative, press-hungry Taylor Swift.
John had, in kindness and sensitivity, offered the duet of “Half of My Heart” to Taylor, extending an offer of friendship and to give her reason to stop copying on-line and pushing suggestions of wanting a relationship with him to the press. When John and I began communicating on-line, I became her target to copy what I wrote in letters to John. Her bullying continues to this day.