John Mayer Posts Moving Tribute to Mac Miller

By Jem Aswad

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – John Mayer posted a moving tribute to his friend and collaborator Mac Miller over the weekend, sharing details of their work together and their relationship. Miller died Friday of an apparent drug overdose .

“He made a quantum leap in his music,” Mayer wrote on Instagram. “That’s incredibly hard to do, to evolve and get better and more focused while your career is already underway.”

He recalled the spontaneous collaboration that occurred after he’d heard Miller’s song “Small Worlds.”

“I didn’t expect to play on his album the day he played some songs for me at his house, but when I heard ‘Small Worlds,’ I gave it a short, chirpy little ‘yup,’ which is the highest praise I can give a track,” Mayer wrote. “It means we don’t need to say another word, it’s going down. I grabbed the nearest guitar in the room and within a couple of hours we had finished a tune that made me so incredibly happy to have a part in, not to mention we established a nice little friendship.”

Mayer, 40, also spoke of sharing advice with the 26-year-old rapper about how to handle fame and the media.

“I gave him whatever guidance I thought I had the right to,” he wrote, “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 was also present at Miller’s final performance, an intimate set for around 100 people at Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles — “one of the best sets I’d seen in a very long time.” ( Watch a video from that show here .)

“His band was unreal,” Mayer wrote. “You gotta know that if you weren’t familiar with , 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.).”