The sweet, sweet smell of money
Maroon 5 vocalist singing the praises of his new perfume line
Adam Levine is a man of many words and, more often than not, those words are all about the music. But the Maroon 5 singer and The Voice judge made an exception to talk about why he decided to cave in and join the celebrity-fragrance game.
Levine said in a recent interview in Toronto that sometimes even the music business is all about the Benjamins.
Asked about the inspiration behind his new fragrance, he bluntly replied: “I dunno, capitalism?”
Still, Levine insists that his new self-titled fragrances for men and women are something he is behind 100 per cent and that he held the creative process close to his heart.
“The only thing that makes you a sellout is if you’re willingly engaging in something, making money from it, and you don’t support the idea,” he said. “Now you could say those things about the fragrance because of remarks that I’ve made in the past. But I thought, ‘Well … I can’t do this unless I’m making something I would actually enjoy.’ And so I did.
“I think that anything I connect myself to, if there’s financial gain as a result, it has to be something that I can be creatively involved in and can make good.”
While celebrities like Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton have written the book on raking in the dough for product lines, Levine insists that it’s not going to be an in-your-face marketing campaign that adds to his bank account.
“I didn’t want it to be like an obvious ploy to make money,” he said.
“It’s a really good product that people will either like or not like. But at the end of the day, I endorse it and I support it. If I saw the bottle, if I smelled it — the whole esthetic of it is something that I approve.”