John Mayer and film director/producer McG are in no rush to leave their personal stamp on the historic Los Angeles studio lot they bought together just over a year ago, which was most recently home to the Jim Henson Company and, before that, A&M Records. In fact, when tasked with giving the lot a “new” name, the duo returned all the way back to the landmark’s 1917 advent as Charlie Chaplin’s production studios, announcing in the new year that they’ve rebranded the vaunted space Chaplin Studios.
“I thought this could be really interesting to have people who are in their 20s, who are working on their first album, go to a place called Chaplin, even if they’re not aware of what the connection is,” Mayer told Billboard and a small group of other reporters during a tour of the lot and a sit-down chat in Studio B last month — one of the first interviews he and McG have given about their lofty Hollywood purchase. “I really like the letters, and I really like the sound, and I think you can honor the history and the legacy of the building, but also distance yourself from it a little bit so you get to establish something new.”
Mayer is no stranger to continuing the legacy of an already well-established brand, having toured with the Grateful Dead offshoot Dead & Company for more than a decade now, so he understands his responsibility as a torchbearer. “I think my mark would be very similar to Dead & Company, in some way,” he says. “I think there’s a similarity to being a bridge to keep something going. That’s enough of a mark for me.”
There’s plenty of history to mine at the 80,000-square-foot lot just south of the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, starting with the silent-film legend in 1917 and continuing with episodes of The Red Skelton Show, The Adventures of Superman and Perry Mason in the 1950s and ’60s, before taking a major musical pivot in 1966 when Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss purchased the lot to become the headquarters of A&M Records. In the label’s newly created recording studios (A&M left one Chaplin-era soundstage untouched in their renovations, among other original buildings), the list of classic productions created there is mind-boggling, from Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Carole King’s Tapestry to the all-time greatest gathering of musical A-listers for the 1985 USA for Africa charity single “We Are the World.” In 2000, Jim Henson’s children purchased the lot to be the new home of The Jim Henson Company, continuing the location’s longtime journey of TV and film production, as well as an active music recording space.
Brecht Van’t Hof
Mayer first made his way to Henson Studios in 2005 to record a cover of “Route 66” for Disney’s Cars soundtrack, and he immediately knew: “I was in a big-time studio. I didn’t know how it stacked up against other things, but I knew, like, ‘OK, this is where Pixar is setting up, and these are the players I’m playing with. And we better get this right, because we don’t have a week; we have a day.’ And then I started to go off and work in other studios, and it wasn’t until when I finally moved, bought a place and really lived somewhere, it was close enough that this made sense to start working here. … At that point, [songwriter/producer/guitarist] John Shanks had just moved out of Studio C, and he had, like, a 17-year stint as a lockout. So I jumped on it. Like, ‘I want to be the next guy to to have a lockout of C.’ And that started since 2018, and so that’s where I’ve slowly just acclimated to this place and loved it and understood it, and understood the vibe really well.”
When word got out a couple of years back that a family with ties to the Church of Scientology was pursuing the lot, McG — best-known for directing the 2000 Charlie’s Angels reboot and executive-producing the 2003-07 teen soap The O.C., and who got his start producing music and shooting videos for Sugar Ray and other bands, oftentimes at A&M/Henson — worked to put together his own bid, but “just didn’t have enough dough.” That’s when studio president Faryal Ganjehei (who started with Henson in 2000 and will continue in her role as president for Chaplin) connected McG with Mayer, whom she knew was also interested in preserving his studio home.
“John and I strangely didn’t know each other all that well prior to our arranged marriage,” McG laughs. But they quickly realized that the filmmaker was “equipped to deal with the headache” of running a lot, while Mayer was interested in being able to “tunnel into the studio, tunnel out.” Irving Azoff — who gave McG his first record deal in the ’90s and is Mayer’s longtime manager — vouched for the partnership, and the $60 million deal was finalized in November 2024.
“For me, this was about keeping the band together,” Mayer says of maintaining the workplace he had created at Henson, adding: “This is about caring about so many people who see each other every day. And especially if you’re me and you’re an artist, and the story goes that you don’t have any semblance of routine in your life, and I found it, and artists find it here — I didn’t want that to break up.”
Mayer and McG also both looked at the purchase for reasons beyond the financial, with the singer/songwriter calling the lot “an emotional asset.” “Everyone’s always looking at assets from a very kind of objective, hard-core, empirical-value level. This is something I wake up and I go to sleep every day knowing in my heart that I have a piece of in some way, or I’m responsible for other people’s piece of it.”
Part of that responsibility is knowing what to change and what to keep exactly the same. “We’re going to bring back the original pattern of the rug, which right now is in Studio A, but I think A is being used,” Mayer says. “So there’s a lot of things to be done in the studio, but for the most part, you leave artists alone, and they do their thing, and they don’t love too much change.” He’s hoping to maintain the exact scent of the recording studios (“I don’t know what makes an old California studio smell like an old California studio, but if you have the smell, keep it”) and isn’t interested in any lighting updates (“If artists walked in, and immediately everything was LED backlit…”). “There’s a nomenclature to being in the studio that lives in its own timeframe,” Mayer says. “And you just let people relate to that still. Even the tapestries — you know, there’s just something about tapestries and string lights that make people want to write songs, even if it’s not the most modern, Tesla-fied thing.”
Mayer is also learning what it’s like to be on the other side of an artist request, like when Justin Bieber was hoping to play some basketball during his downtime on the lot while recording Swag last year. Ganjehei immediately put the industrious studio runners on the job of turning the soundstage into Bieber’s private court. “Two hours later, three hours later, maybe later on that night, I get an image of what looks like a perfect basketball court with a three-point line, a foul line, everything, all the tape,” Mayer recalls. “The runners had figured out how to do it.” That’s all part of the studio gig, Mayer says: “If Justin Bieber had something that you could hear on Swag that was nominated for album of the year at the Grammys because he was able to shoot a little hoops on a break, then we’ve done our job.”
Perhaps Mayer will be putting in his own special requests to the Chaplin team as he goes back into artist mode this year to create his ninth studio album. “It’s become harder and harder and harder to block out the expanse of time it takes to make a record,” Mayer admits. “And it took me a couple of years to realize I may never make a record again if I continue to just do these projects. And by the way: It’s a great reason not to make a record for a couple of years to get the studio going, to write a Sphere show and put on the Sphere show [with Dead & Co.]. So what I’ve been doing is, probably since October… it’s like pumping the brakes on an 18-wheeler to get a schedule in 2026 to be open enough to make an album. And so I have done that.”
He’ll still make time for his SiriusXM channel, Life With John Mayer, but “other than that, I have to get back in the role of being an artist, and the way you do that is you throw tons of time at it. There is no way to streamline an album. And if you want to streamline an album, you can do it, but it won’t be very good.”
While he might be spending some extra hours in Studio C this year, his and McG’s purchase has also protected his ideal space to create — and his travel time to get there. “It’s the only place I can think of that is where it is and is what it is,” Mayer says of the Hollywood space. “Because if you come to L.A., you’re probably staying somewhere around here. If it’s time to go rehearse, you’ve got to go to Burbank. Artists don’t love being in the car all day going to Burbank, to go to Center Stage or to go to Conway or to go, you know, across town or to go anywhere. This is so centralized, but also feels like the kind of place you would have to drive 12 miles away, 6 miles away, and take an hour and a half to get this kind of space in this kind of openness, and that might be my favorite thing is right here, grandfathered in, it’s one of the last lots in this location where the gates open and they close behind you, and you own a different style of air on this block. And everyone else has to share the air that’s created by the rest of La Brea and the rest of Sunset, but there’s this one block that still can create its own tempo without having to drive out an hour and a half or an hour in traffic to touch that kind of air. So that’s really cool to me.”
(Learn more about the Chaplin soundstage and recording studios.)
