Unapologetically positive
Jason Mraz fully embraces reggae on his new album.
JASON Mraz is happy to be “unapologetically positive” as evidenced by the name of his 2019 Good Vibes Tour and by such buoyant Mraz songs as I’m Yours, Have
It All and The Remedy (I Won’t Worry).
The Grammy Award-winning troubadour is also happy that his irrepressibly upbeat new album,
Look For The Good, embraces reggae music from start to finish. The album, which opens and closes with the words “look for the good,” also finds the guitarist focusing more on piano and other keyboard instruments.
And he is especially happy that the album’s closing selection,
Gratitude, celebrates his unabashedly positive outlook, beginning with its opening line: “I’m so grateful, I’m so grateful”. Shortly before its conclusion, Mraz declares: “I’m grateful to gratitude itself (Thank you!)/it helps me look for the good (Thank you!)”.
But dig deeper into the 10-years-in-the-making song Gratitude –and into Mraz himself – and there’s more than meets the eye and ear to this quintessentially happy-golucky singer-songwriter than his all-smiles public persona.
“I am unapologetically positive,” he said. “But it’s only because I’m a pessimist. It’s only because I get so melancholic and down, and because I have thought – for a long time – that the world is out of balance . ... I have a pessimistic view of the world, because I’m pessimistic about myself.”
Mraz’s own world was seriously out of balance when he was a teenager. The 42-year-old musician still vividly recalls the slights and harassment he received while growing up in the small Virginia town of Mechanicsville, in the United States.
He chronicles some of those experiences in the opening verse of
Gratitude, on which he sings: I thank the boys who kicked my a** when I was 17/I thank the ones who chose to laugh and those who acted mean/i thank the bullies for all the scraps and accidents and then some.
Mraz being Mraz, he makes musical lemonade out of lemons by thanking those same bullies in his “very autobiographical” song’s next line.
“They shaped my life, they made me like who I’ve become,” he sings. “They made me love who I am.
More to life
Why, exactly, did Mraz get beaten up? And did being bullied make him more determined to succeed?
“It definitely made me want to leave my hometown ... because I thought: ‘You know what? There’s more to life than this small town,’” he replied, speaking from the rural Oceanside farm he shares with his wife, Christina Carano.
“The guys who picked on me were all boyfriends of the girls I was hanging out with. Because I was in show choir, cheerleading and drama club, I was friends with all these girls. I think that created a sense of envy, or something, for their boyfriends. And the only way they could feel better was to put me in my place and slam me up against school lockers.”
Mraz moved to California in 1999 after being discovered in Las Vegas by top San Diego concert promoter Bill Silva, who served as his manager for the next 18 years.
After graduating from high school, Mraz studied for about 18 months at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York. This was followed by short stint at Longwood University in Virginia, during which he decided to devote himself to music and moved to California.
While piano was Mraz’s first instrument as a child, he bought an acoustic guitar before moving to New York. The instrument lends itself well to the rhythmic lilt of reggae music, which he first heard as a boy on one of his father’s favorite albums, the 1984 compilation 20 Reggae Classics .Butit wasn’t until high school that Mraz discovered the Bob Marley & The Wailers’ best-of collection, Legends.
“That album really permeated our high school in a big way and influenced a lot of our thinking and attitudes,” he recalled.
“Once I started making music with friends in my college years, then moving into (playing) coffee shops and then into touring, more of my musician friends started to contribute to my listening. My (audio) monitor engineer, Micah Goldfarb, had all the (Jamaican) Studio One, Trojan Records and Easy Star All-stars albums, and he started passing me CDS that were changing my whole view.
“Then I started to add a reggae style to my songs when we would go on tour, especially for crowds at festivals, where we wanted to reach a broader audience and I noticed that reggae touched a lot of people. Since 2003, I’d dabble and try a song of mine here and there as reggae.”
Peace and love
Folk, pop, soul and light funk have long been Mraz’s musical calling cards. But his career-changing international hit, 2008’s I’m Yours, was elevated by its reggae lilt. The song, whose video now has more than half a billion views on Youtube, indirectly paved the way for his new album Look For
The Good, released last week, and is credited to “Jason Mraz & Friends”.
Those friends include: actor and comedian Tiffany Haddish, reggae vocal mainstay Sister Carol and members of Poway’s Mesa View Baptist Church Choir.
“I knew it would be fun, one day, to do a whole collection of reggae songs, (especially) after I’m Yours, which was not a reggae song but was certainly influenced by reggae. I thought: ‘The whole world listens to reggae, so how cool would it be to do a whole album of reggae?’ It’s taken me 10 years to do it.”
But he does not claim to be a reggae artiste, however much he admires the music. And Mraz readily acknowledges he’s no authority on Rastafarianism, the religious and political movement that started in Jamaica in the 1930s and is foundational to reggae.
“I’m just a reggae fan. I can’t embody the music and culture,” he stressed.
“By doing this album, I got to know about where this music came from, but reggae is not me. I didn’t dive into Jamaican culture and this album is not about Rastafarianism. I have total respect for that, but reggae is really a fusion of rhythm-andblues and Caribbean music. And Rastafarianism is a fusion of Christianity and Jamaican culture.
“I do know I’m treading on sacred ground. But I also feel safe, because of what reggae has historically sung (about) peace and love, comfort and healing. And that’s what I’m trying to do with this album.”
His 12-song Look For The Good album was recorded last summer. He is so pleased with it that he is already laying the foundation for a second reggae album, which he hopes to record in August. While the coronavirus pandemic is preventing Mraz from touring to promote the new album, when he does resume playing concerts again, reggae will likely be at the fore.
“We do know if we take a reggae act on the road, there is a lot more material than these 12 songs,” he said.
“There are six other albums of mine and some of my back catalogue is getting converted through the new reggae machine. It’s a very exciting sound and it’s giving new life to my old songs in a beautiful way.” – The San Diego Uniontribune/tribune News Service