anonymous August 17th, 2008 04:07PM  
This song is, like most Mayer tunes, about love. He's describing the gravity that is pulling him out of that first infatuation stage of the relationship, and towards something that's longer lasting ("twice as much, ain't twice is good...can't sustain, like one half could"). However, at the same time, he feels some nostalgia for that first part of the relationship ("keep me where the light is"), and a longing for the deeper love that he hopes will come with time (...wanting more, that's gonna send me to my knees..). Temptation to cheat is rampant in the meantime, though he knows on a conscious level that he will only destroy his chances of true love by doing so ("...dream of ways to through it all away...").

anonymous September 24th, 2008 11:20PM  
I think this song is about our constant struggle with our humanity and the limitations that come with it, whether it be in love or with our other passions (in John's case music and song-writing). He wants to be great or maybe even perfect, but he keeps realizing that it's impossible. In the end, he still yearns to be great but accepts his humanity when he says "just keep me where the light is".

hurt_enough November 24th, 2008 04:33AM  
Wrt the previous comment...i don't think that you can say that someone else's interpretation is "wrong". That's the whole beauty of music and lyrics - that what resonates as meaning for YOU may not necessarily ring true for someone else. This site is called lyric INTERPRETATION...NOT lyrics WHAT THE SONG REALLY MEANS!...if it were - we would just ask the person who wrote the song what they meant. I love this site coz I love reading about how one song has such a multitude of meaning for anyone - and how that always resonates with something that they are going through at the time...

i think this song - gravity - is just about something that brings you down - like duh! - but that could be drugs, love, sex, friendship etc etc...i always love listening to this song when I'm feeling down. Somehow it helps lift me up. just the idea that someone else has been affected so deeply by something [whatever it is] that they've likened it to gravity...that for me is powerful. I didn't know what the word was for that feeling - but now I do...it's gravity.....great song!

anonymous March 11th, 2009 07:58AM  
In a concert performed in December 2005, Mayer explained the significance and meaning of the song:
“ This is the most important song I’ve ever written, it's a time capsule song. I will listen to it every day of my life if I need to. It's honest to God the most important song I’ve ever written in my life, and it has the fewest words. I was in LA, and I was there for the summer, just writing tunes, and I was in the shower. And I don't know where it came from, but it's the damn truth you know, and I just sang, "gravity...is working against me."

And I just want to say that my full-time job, being—this is true—being a musician is almost a side job to my full-time job of not screwing up. Because the world was devised to be pretty damn even, except for terminal illness, and things that people just absolutely... They're just flukes and they're... You know, I don't know if they're making up for something else way far away that they don't deserve, but it all pretty much evens out.

And if you're gonna do this thing and get paid, and you know, get a car over the phone, if you're gonna do this stuff, something else is gonna happen that is gonna be a temptation to pull you off of it because the people that don't have that going on, they're hoping for that, cause that makes the world even. That makes them even, it makes you even, and where I am now in my life, I’m on a track where as soon as you get in a room, the room is full of things to take you out of the room. "Now that you've made it, here are a plethora of things you can do to not make it. Here are a... Here's the Out door..." and... It's a fill-in-the-blank you know. It's like mad libs. It's like:

[puts hand up to ear like a telephone] "Oh hey John, this is [person that plays... person in the room]... Umm, [person's name, famous person's name] wants to meet you, they want to meet at the top of [famous restaurant] umm, they're really into ya, come on down, you know, in [number] minutes"

and you go... "no." And inside you go... "yeah," but outside you go, "n-n-no." Because those are all ways to take you out. They exist as soon as you get... Even if you're not successful, when you get successful... It's like...

I got successful when I was 23, and that's a crazy looking arc if you chart it out... And all I gotta do is stay up. And sometimes coming down is something to do, because staying up is really boring. If I go out to a party, most people who ask me to a party ask me there so I can be the famous guy at the party, not so I can meet famous people at the party. I am now... When I’m on a plane from New York to LA or LA to New York, and I go [looking around the room], "there are no famous people on the plane, there's usually always one famous person on a plane from New York to LA..." and I go, "ahh shit that's me!! That's not right!"

Umm, this is a song about... making sure you still love yourself... making sure you still have your head on, making sure you still say no the way your mom would say no. And I will need it every damn day of my life because it's easier to mess up than it is to stay here.
”

anonymous February 11th, 2010 11:00AM  
I think that this song is about the weight of a heart to a person. Its how heavy a loving heart can be on someone.

If you love someone too much, it can be too much for someone to handle:

"Twice as much ain't twice as good
And can't sustain like one half could
It's wanting more that's gonna send me to my knees"

The part of sustaining, I believe, is how well that person could hold themself up if they didn't love that much, and that is the reason that twice as much love doesn't mean its twice as good, because it makes the heart too heavy to bear.

Especially if you don't know if they love you back, so you may want to forget it and move on, but you can't do anything but love that person and it hurts and weighs you down:

"Oh, I'll never know what makes this man
With all the love that his heart can stand
Dream of ways to throw it all away."

To get rid of that love so that it doesn't hurt anymore and so that he can keep moving on.


"Gravity, stay the hell away from me
And gravity has taken better men than me."

Here it may mean that stronger people have been weighed down crushed by there love for another person.