I Didn’t ‘Run Away’ From the Taylor Swift Situation - John Meyer

After leaving Hollywood for two years, John Mayer is slowly stepping back into the limelight. A few weeks ago, Mayer performed his first live show in 20 months and, of course, there is the high-profile romance he has going on with Katy Perry.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone, the 35-year-old singer reveals why he needed to get away to Montana for a while. Did it have anything to do with the explosive interviews he gave about his famous ex-girlfriends? Or the “Taylor Swift situation," he was asked.

“I don't know that I thought of it as a Band-Aid for anything,” Mayer responded. “I just saw it as a protectant from future things. I wasn't running away, because I would have happily gone back on tour.”

Swift’s 2010 song “Dear John,” which was reportedly about their brief relationship, dominated headlines when it came out. Mayer later said it “made [him] feel terrible” and he called it “cheap songwriting.”

Still, Mayer insists that isn’t why he traded in nights at Chateau Marmont for a quiet life in Montana.

“When I got to [Montana], I thought that I was going on tour. That's important to know. I thought that was going to be the place I hung out in between legs of a tour,” Mayer explained to the mag. “Then it turned out there wasn't going to be a tour, and I thought, ‘Well, let me just go start laying down my roots there’…So, no, by that point it wasn't like, ‘Let me go retreat.’”

Mayer reemerged last year with Perry on his arm, and a new mature mindset about dealing with the paparazzi and public scrutiny that tend to document every detail of his life.

“I used to be incredibly put off by somebody taking a picture, thinking as if in some way it was it was invading my brain. But all it is, is you can see where I was last weekend,” Mayer said.

“I think time has shown that nothing will be stolen from you,” he continued. “It's just a photograph of you and your dumb scarf that you put on because it wouldn't fit in your suitcase. Cool. If you want to ‘style police’ my day off, that's fine.”

Well, Perry seems to be just fine with his dumb scarves.

“It's been . . . I mean, I'm quite happy,” he explained, when asked how their relationship has been. “I'm happy in all aspects of my life. I'm very happy in all aspects of my life.”

In random Perry relationship news: another new interview released today revealed that she once (sort of) dated Josh Groban.

“We're very good friends,” Groban told Details for their February 2013 issue. “We met before her first album was even released, and we hit it off because we're both goofballs… We might have skated on the line of dating.”

Still Perry — who was once married to Russell Brand — doesn’t have nearly as many famous exes as Mayer, whose former relationships include Jessica Simpson, Jennifer Aniston and Swift.

Here’s hoping the “Daughters” singer sticks with his new mature outlook and Perry doesn’t become another name added to his little black book.