Jason Merritt/Getty Images for The UCLA Department of Head and Neck SurgeryJohn Mayer is back on Twitter.
The singer-songwriter quit the social networking site in September 2010, bidding adieu to his 3.7 million followers with a cryptic, yet clever, message: "What does this button do?" Mayer explained his decision to abandon the medium during a Berklee College of Music clinic in the summer of 2011.
"I realized about a year ago that I couldn't have a complete thought anymore, and I was a tweetaholic," said Connecticut-born Mayer, 36. "I had four million Twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using Twitter as an outlet and I started using Twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn't write a song."
In April 2010, Mayer told E! News that he was exploring other ways to connect with fans online. "Every night I think about canceling my Twitter account because I think it's pretty much done. I just think Twitter as a form of communication, I think it's over, to be honest with you. I would rather see Twitter be a cork board of links to other more important things, because it's really sort of flawed from the beginning. I can't tell you how many times I meet people or I'm having dinner with people who write stuff and they get upset they have haters now, like, 'Why do I want to invent more reasons to have haters?' I might as well spend that time making a sandwich or building a model ship or something."
Mayer returned to Twitter on Friday, Jan. 31, 2014. "I'm back. What'd I miss?" he wrote. Then then tweeted a YouTube link to Rebecca Black's 2011 viral video "Friday," and jokingly pretended to be out of the loop. "Been waiting SO long to share this with you. It's so bad it's good. Take a look," he wrote.
After instructing his fans to follow Katy Perry, Mayer joked, "I'll be honest, when it came to rejoining twitter, I had mixed emojis." It's not yet known why the "Wildfire" singer is back—but perhaps it has sometime to do with his 29-year-old girlfriend. She is, after all, the most popular person on Twitter.