Jason Mraz |
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Wed. January 15.2003 4:24 PM EST |
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Jason Mraz: Confessions of a Dangerous Cap WearerImaginative song stylist and human sampling machine plays "down-home summer surf music” from the heart. by C. Bottomley |
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Jason Mraz (Linda Zacks) |
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Boyish singer Jason Mraz is plucking at a banjo and wearing the kind of floppy-brimmed hat Chuck Barris might have once sported on The Gong Show. Onstage at New York’s Bowery Ballroom, flanked by a stand-up bassist and longtime percussionist
Littered among the highlights from Mraz's impressive Waiting for My Rocket to Come, the Bowery audience hears snatches of Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” and even the English folk duo Turin Brakes’ “Future Boy,” a song so obscure most of Mraz’s fans might think it an original. He lets the song slide into his funky theme tune “Curbside Prophet,” where he describes himself as “a down home brother, redneck undercover.” The night ends with Madness’ “Our House” - sung in Spanish. “It’s sampling,” he explained earlier that day, sipping on a cup of tea, his baseball cap set at a jaunty angle. “Throughout our show, we drop in snatches of Willie Nelson and Michael Jackson tunes. Jurassic Five do it all the time. We don’t have a DJ, but there’s no reason I can’t do it with my mouth. I’m paying tribute to the music that I grew up listening to. I want my audience in on that, because a lot of people may not know my new songs.” The songs on Waiting for My Rocket to Come are good enough to win ears on their own. “The Remedy (I Won’t Worry)” is an upbeat radio anthem - all shuffling guitars, broad harmonies, and pure pop choruses. The yearning “You and I Both” sounds more like who Mraz wishes to be. When he performs the song during our interview, it becomes a showcase for his powerful soprano and artful guitar picking. Onstage, he’s cocksure enough about his own talent, but here it’s so intimate it almost like he’s daring you to listen. Watch Mraz perform "You And I Both". “My music is very social, but there’s definitely a confessional element," he says. “I’ve been hired to play wedding receptions or house parties in the past, but I realized it’s not your typical background music; it’s an invite-only kind of party music!” As “Curbside Prophet” explains, that music has its roots in a variety of different places: in California, where Mraz currently lives; in New York, where he studied musical theatre; and then in his home state of Virginia, where he returned to polish his art after busking on Manhattan’s mean streets. Mraz moved in with a girlfriend he credits with developing the love of wordplay evident in “Curbside Prophet’s” rapid-fire rhymes (“I bet my whole checking account/because it all amounts to nothing up in the end.”) or the metaphorical “Too Much Food” (“Well, if you are what you eat/in my case I’ll be sweet.”). “She was quite the poet,” Mraz explains in a Virginia purr softened by four years on the West Coast. “She taught me to write every day. We were a very wordy couple at the time! Once I was comfortable doing it, I took what I learned from her and continued on my own. It was a tough split. But “You and I Both” is a tribute to her. Anytime there’s wordplay, I learned it from her!” Watch Mraz perform "I'll Do Anything". That Virginia idyll was also dedicated to absorbing the work of Jeff Buckley, whose operatic stylings Mraz has studied, and spinning jazz, which nurtured his love of loose-limbed scatting. “It would be cool to be as surprising vocally as Miles Davis [was with his horn],” he explains. “You never know where he’s gonna go, when he’s gonna stop, when he’s gonna shoot way up. I wanted to do that in my melodies. Then someone played me a song by Ella Fitzgerald called ‘Air Mail Special.’ It was four minutes of just scat! It was the most incredible thing I’d ever heard. Her band was right behind her, too. She would change and do a part, and they would hit it with her. I just lost it! I was like, ‘I wanna do this!’” [Watch Clip] Alas, back then, aside from playing a few parties at the local college’s theatre fraternity, Mraz wasn’t going very far. He applied to Longwood College in Farmville, Va., was accepted, and decided that before he condemned himself to four years of studying, he would enjoy a last hurrah out West. The decision was a turning point. “I went to California for a week and it blew my mind,” Mraz remembers. “I had never been out west and there was so much going on inside me. Then I had to come back to Farmville and I felt like I was in juvenile detention, where there were cinder block walls and I had to be up every morning at eight. The first day of school they make you start writing papers and I was like [laughs] ‘This isn’t me!’ “Every time I closed my eyes I could see California. My student loan check came, and all I could was see was ‘California California California California …Pay to the order of California.’ I went straight to the Wal-Mart, cashed it, and two days later I was out. I’ve been out there now for almost four years and it’s still brand new to me.” [Watch Clip] Underneath the warm California sun, Mraz began house-sitting in San Diego, which gave him the ideas for the breezy “Sleep All Day” and the countrified “Who Needs Shelter.” “I experimented with a lot of different things just to see how they would feel,” he admits of these hedonistic days. “After staying up all night, I began to hang out with a morning crowd. I thought, ‘What a different world! There are these people who jog and do all kinds of stuff before they go to work!’ I thought, ‘I’m gonna turn this around. I’m gonna become a morning person!’ I wrote ‘Who Needs Shelter,’ hoping that it would be my new theme. I would get away from the ‘Sleep All Day’ thing and do the ‘Who Needs Shelter’ thing, because it’s important that I get up and have a full day. But it didn’t last!” [Watch Clip] Mraz may not have been seeing much daylight, but he was gaining a rep. He became a fixture at Java Joe’s, a coffee shop and haven for local musicians. Teaming up with Toca Rivera and developing his nimble navigation of AOR chestnuts and his peppy originals, Mraz soon built up a loyal following. “Our coffee shop show wasn’t your typical coffee shop show,” Mraz says. “I don’t mean to bust on any coffee shop folks but it was more of a danceable atmosphere. People would be screaming and hollering and having a ball. It wasn’t a sit-down show where I would describe my song and play the song and then describe the next song. That bores the hell out of me.” People noticed. On a trip to Las Vegas, Mraz bumped into promoter Bill Silva, who, after hearing a handful of songs, agreed to become his manager. Then Mraz returned to Virginia to record with John Alagia, a producer best known for his work with Dave Matthews and John Mayer. Alagia also produced a group called Agents of Good Roots. Imagine the singer's surprise when the Agents, his favorite band in high school, were suggested as his studio group. “My world was coming full circle,” he recalls. “Agents of Good Roots had inspired me to pursue the guitar and my singer-songwriter meets jazz/soul/whatever this is. I was a little nervous going into it, but before we recorded, they invited me over to the house to have a barbecue and get to know each other. It was everything I had envisioned in high school! The album became a mixture of the San Diego sound with the Good Roots vibe. It’s like a redneck from the beach playing down-home summer surf music.” Now Mraz’s mission is to make others hear it, and things are going well. He opened for Matthews on the West Coast, and the dean of granola rock himself joined him onstage to play “Dancing Nancies.” If the crowd of smitten girls and rowdy frat boys at Mraz’s New York show are proper evidence, word is spreading. The singer is heading to Australia to make a video for “The Remedy” with Highlander director Russell Mulcahy, and watch out, Eminem - he’s already crossed John Mayer. Last year, in an interview, Mraz declared he was going to "haunt" the cherubic singer after Mayer reneged on a recording session promise. "If I saw him," Mraz said in a slightly obtuse way, "I would kill his ass with kindness." “It was just a sour day I had months ago,” Mraz exclaims when asked about the "feud" that the press subsequently concocted. “It wasn’t between him and me, ever! We had asked him to play some guitar on the record and he said yes. But then scheduling didn’t work out and he couldn’t do it. The way I told it [in the interview] came across kind of crass, I guess. He read the article on his birthday and gave me a call. He said, ‘What is this? I thought we were cool!’ I’m like [shudders] ‘We are cool.’ We met up and had a couple of beers and we’re fine now” With that cleared up, there’s just one question left. What’s with all those darn hats? “I’ve always worn hats,” Mraz says. “You can go back to my second grade yearbook and I’m wearing a stylish little leather cap. My mom even wrote a note saying, ‘It’s okay for him to wear hats.’ I think I’ve worn them so long that I feel naked without one. Now I even sleep in them!” |
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