John Mayer will play the first night of the two-day YLIVE concert at Wean Park.
By ANDY GRAY
Staff writer
YOUNGSTOWN — John Mayer will play at Wean Park on Sept. 26, turning YLIVE into a two-day event.
His show will precede Tim McGraw, who will perform the next day. That show originally was planned for 2024 and was postponed until this year due to the infrastructure disruptions caused by the Realty Tower explosion downtown.
Mayer hasn’t done a full-scale tour with his own music since 2023, when he sold out arenas nationwide for a run of solo acoustic shows. Mayer will be playing with a full band for YLIVE, one of only five dates currently on his tour schedule for the remainder of 2025, according to JAC Live Chief Operating Officer Ken Bigley.
“For artists of his magnitude, it’s, ‘Does he want to headline Coachella? Does he want to headline Bonnaroo?’ Those are the types of offers that are coming across his desk,” Bigley said. “When you look at the very select dates he’s playing this year and to put Youngstown on that list, we thought that was just extraordinary.”
The day after YLIVE, Mayer will be playing at the University of Michigan’s Football Stadium in Ann Arbor with Zach Bryan for a crowd of more than 100,000 people.
Mayer is a seven-time Grammy winner who has sold more than 20 million albums worldwide and had his songs streamed billions of times. He had multiple hits on the Hot 100, rock, adult contemporary and adult album alternative charts.
In addition to touring with his own music, since 2015 Mayer has toured with surviving members of the Grateful Dead as Dead & Company. Its sold-out tours include a 50-show residency at Sphere in Las Vegas.
Bigley and JAC Live President Eric Ryan have talked for years about expanding YLIVE to two shows in order to spread out the costs involved in transforming the park between the Covelli Centre and Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre into an outdoor concert venue able to accommodate more than 20,000 attendees.
They started looking at possible acts to bring in as a second show, and Bigley described it as an “a-ha moment” when they realized Mayer was available on that last Friday in September.
And with Mayer not playing any other shows in Ohio or Pennsylvania, Bigley said he believes Mayer will help them achieve another goal of YLIVE.
“The thought is to get people traveling in and we fill up those hotels, we fill up those restaurants for the weekend,” Bigley said. “It shows Youngstown’s strength as a concert market. We’re always traveling to Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Columbus, wherever for shows. This is a chance for them to travel here.”
While McGraw’s primary popularity is with country listeners and Mayer’s audience is rock fans, Bigley said both have a large female fanbase and other demographic similarities that make the shows complementary.
That’s one of the reasons JAC will offer ticket packages that include both shows in addition to selling tickets for each date individually.
JAC is pausing sales on McGraw tickets, and tickets for Mayer and McGraw — either separately or as a combined package — will go on sale at 10 a.m. July 11 through Ticketmaster. Current McGraw ticket holders will be contacted by email with information on how to convert their existing ticket to a combo ticket, if desired.
Bigley said opening acts for both shows will be announced soon.
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