Atlanta | John Mayer

"I'm always most inspired when it comes down to me," he explains. "Put me in a room, and tell me I can leave but first I have to put this thing together out of 100 pieces, and I'll stay there and do it. If I know there's a way, I'll do it. Atlanta was the first time I discovered there was a way to do it."

Mayer spent four years playing the starving­-musician role, toiling away in the city's vibrant live-music culture, taking in all this Southern capital had to offer both on- and offstage. Now, on the eve of his third major-label effort, Continuum, Mayer­ remembers his adopted hometown as a dizzying array of diverse cultures, all living in coexistent equilibrium. "Atlanta is one game board with a dozen different games being played on it at the same time, and no two pieces hit each other. That's what's so cool about it. Honest to God. Somehow or another, it all completes itself."

Or maybe that's just how he remembers Waffle House (more on that later). Either way, Atlanta was very good to John Mayer, so now it's his turn to give back to the people who knew him before every member of your family did.

What brought you to Atlanta in the first place? I had made a friend who was from Atlanta. We kind of became a singer-­songwriter duo at Berklee and both decided to withdraw, the plan being I would live with him in Atlanta and start a life and career down there. We had a falling-out, but I still ended up down there. I was far enough along into that lineage that there was nowhere else to go but back home into the world of "I told you so" at my parents' house. At the same time, I had had a real connection with the city, and I knew I wasn't done figuring that place out, so I stayed there.