John Mayer has shared a heartfelt note dedicated to his late friend Mac Miller, who he says was about to have the best year of his career.
“He made a quantum leap in his music,” Mayer wrote on Instagram Saturday (Sept. 8). “That’s incredibly hard to do, to evolve and get better and more focused while your career is already underway.”
Mayer had recently formed a bond with Miller — who died Friday from what appears to be a drug overdose — after playing guitar on the 26-year-old rapper’s slow-churning song “Small Worlds.” Mayer recollected about how funny Miller was, and said he passed along some advice to the young rapper about the media.
“I gave him whatever guidance I thought I had the right to, having been through the press ringer in the past and wanting him to understand that none of that noise could ever really take a bite out of the music he was about to put out,” he wrote.
Mayer also noted how impressed he was after seeing Miller perform for a 100-person crowd at Los Angeles’ intimate Hotel Cafe. He described the show as “one of the best sets I’d seen in a very long time.”
“His band was unreal,” Mayer wrote. “You gotta know that if you weren’t familiar with Mac Miller, you were about to be, whether you would have seen him at a festival, or a friend was going to catch a show and tell everyone they knew about it (like I did.).”
Prior to his unexpected death, Miller was scheduled to embark on a 26-date fall tour in support of his latest album, Swimming. The tour was set to launch Oct. 27 at The Masonic in San Francisco.