Jason Mraz

The first thing you need to know about Jason Mraz is that he hails from Mechanicsville, Virginia. The bucolic hamlet (the town directory points out it’s ‘only 9 miles form the state capital – ‘as the crow flies’), got its name in the early 1800’s from its blacksmithing prowess. Maybe it’s a stretch – but the versatile songsmith Mraz seems to have inherited a unique ability to do his own melding, forging the fast-and-loose meanderings of a seemingly non-stop imagination into deeply rooted, virtuoso performances.

His debut album, Waiting For My Rocket To Come, is filled with uniquely crafted songs as pitch-perfect and wide ranging as you’re likely to find on any debut album this year. Displaying a songwriting radius that fleshes out brilliant ditties such as “You And I Both,” or, the humorously autobiographical scat of “Curbside Prophet,” Mraz takes his place alongside a handful of singer/songwriters blessed with the insight to banish any/and all songwriting formulas from their repertoire. Like the influences he touts in his self-made hand outs – everyone from Dave Matthews to Sade, from Beck, to Bjork to Toca Rivera (who by the way serves as Mraz’s indispensable percussionist) – Mraz is true to his muse, obsessed with his own form of soul searching. He cleverly notes in his very own website diatribe: “‘Was that a dream or was it real? Everyday I wake up asking myself: ‘who came up with that?’ Oh, you did.”’

As critics jostle for position to fling the perfect hyphenated descriptions of his mercurial sound (world-meets-folk-meets-trippy meets-jazzy might be a good start for your cliff notes), Mraz has set his sights on – as he puts it -“doing what I always do. Trying to win ’em over one fan at a time.”

He honed his intimate approach to audience building in the burgeoning coffee shop scene of San Diego. He had left Virginia for California in 1999, after a brief, false start at a music career in New York City in the mid-90’s. “I did a short stint in New York’s American Musical and Dramatic Academy,” he recalls. “I left pretty soon after, and headed home for Mechanicsville realizing I wanted to play the guitar.” Mraz says he soon grew bored of “the day-job thing back home, and thought I’d head west, because I happened to know one person who lived out there, and pursue songwriting.”

He ventured to San Francisco for a month, but moved to San Diego in April of ’99 to seek out the growing acoustic scene there. “I fell in love with the place. For a big city it still has the small town atmosphere. I could tell they embraced all varieties of music there, because I’d see the same people in the audience at all kind of different shows. I started making friends with the coffee shop owners and tried to get weekly spots. I met a cat named Java Joe who let me play their every Thursday night. We started doing it with 14 people coming, and today the shows are sold out.”

It was also during Mraz’s early coffee shop days that he hooked up with drummer Toca Rivera, whose Djembe style percussion and charismatic stage presence added to Mraz’s one-of-a-kind live performance. “I met him at an open mike. He was playing with his brother at the time,” says Mraz. “I fell in love with everything he was doing. It was so simple. His whole thing he had going on was kind of the opposite to me. It was everything I was looking for in a band. We’re such an odd couple. It’s been such a blast.”

And it’s precisely that un-checked exuberance that has made Mraz’s live shows one of the most talked about in years. He’s quickly built a coast to coast legion of loyal fans who follow his comings-and-goings via the internet, devouring Mraz’s aforementioned humorous notations of just where he fits on pop’s self-important pecking order: “How many times does someone like you look at his tongue in the mirror?” Mraz asks himself online. “Twenty, at least,” he answers. “That’s four times an hour during the five I’m awake.”

Such irreverence easily translates to his concerts, where Mraz says the key is keeping the audience ‘in’ the show. “I said to myself if I’m going to pursue this as a career, I want to inject some humor in this, get some poetry into the songs and make sure the audience stays interested. I remember I saw Dave Matthews when I was still in high school, and I was just struck by how lively he came across. It was like: ‘OK, so you don’t have to be boring when you play the guitar.’ When I got to San Diego, it wasn’t like I knew exactly what I was going to do, but through the countless shows, I found out it was more fun to keep the audience engaged. We do so much audience participation and let the audience in our just about most of our secrets. We’re constantly mixing things up on each other as players, never doing the same song the same way twice. I tried the best way I could to get that feeling on the record.”

Mraz accomplished his mission with the help of producer John Alagia (Dave Matthews Band, John Mayer), and also learned first-hand what a songwriting prodigy is up against when faced with the pressures of crafting a major league debut album. “Everybody at the record company (Elektra) has been great, but once in awhile you’re faced with having to make a decision you might not have to make playing in Java Joe’s, if you know what I mean.” Mraz points to one of the last songs he recorded, “Too Much Food,” as a thinly disguised takeoff on the too-many-cooks scenario of record making. “I wrote it really, when I was at a hotel eating McDonalds or somewhere after some pretty long co-writing sessions where I started feeling like I’d never write a song by myself a gain. I was in Nashville on the last night before I was heading home. I just started reeling off these little lines. When we were in the studio again I found the notes and the song came out so quickly. I also love it because I never had a chance to have a real rock n’ roll band before, and the song has such great session players on it.” The song, among other lyrical highlights, laments: ‘making friends with the ketchup and salt.’

Some other songs Mraz talks about:

“You And I Both”: “It was Part 2 of an old song, one of the first songs I’d ever written. I used to write with my girlfriend back in ’96. She was one of the people who actually turned me on to songwriting. We broke up, and I guess this is a tribute to her.”

“Curbside Prophet”: “I had a friend that was so into rapping and it started there, I think. I wanted to tell my life story in a different sort of way. Its kind of chunk after chunk after chunk of what happened to me.”

“Absolutely Zero” : “That was the toughest one. I was about to make the record and I was seeing this girl and one of them had to go. I dropped the girl right before Valentines Day and I felt like such an idiot. I guess I wanted to spend more time writing songs than being with her. I felt bad about the whole thing and wrote the song.”

Mraz also says there’s a reason he posed with a rooster on the cover of the new album. “I guess it’s my way of acknowledging that maybe the album is too cocky. I had always tried to make music that other people could step into and become the main character. I realized after listening to this album that there’s a lot of me, me, me.”

It’s that kind of refreshing insight that makes Mraz’s entrée into the pop music world so exciting to watch. A few more of his online witticisms shed light on the singer’s refusal to bow to mainstream expectations. “According to Freud I’m a pervert,” he writes. “But I love to see the world’s smile and while the world’s got its mouth open grinning, I’ll sing right down their throats hoping they’ll find their own way of regurgitating it later. Like a global vomiting of wisdom, purity, and enlightenment. Good things,” he deadpans.

And where does the effusive songwriter see himself ten years from now: “Hopefully retired. Let’s blow it up for awhile, hell, let’s blow it up for one year even. I can live with going back to my own thing in San Diego and playing to my regular crowd. In the meantime – explore, explore, explore.”