Inside Maroon 5's Sessions for Fall Album 'Hands All Over'

How do you top a twice-platinum smash album like It Won't Be Soon Before Long? For Maroon 5, you team up with the producer behind megahit records like AC/DC's Back in Black and Def Leppard's Hysteria. For their forthcoming disc Hands All Over (due out in September), the California pop-rockers jetted over to producer Robert "Mutt" Lange's studio in Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where they spent two months writing and recording their third record. Rolling Stone has exclusive footage of the group cutting the new album (check out the clip above).

"He worked me harder than anyone ever has," M5 frontman Adam Levine tells Rolling Stone. "I would come in with a finished song, and he'd say, 'That's a good start. Now strip it down to the drums and start over.' The coolest thing about him is that not only has he been a huge, legendry producer, but he also is a legit, serious writer."

The resulting disc is the band's brightest-sounding and poppiest yet. "His opinion was, 'Your success is cute, but I think you can be huge,'" says Levine. The album delivers Lange's mix of catchy hooks and punchy rhythms on the funk-rock sing-along "Misery" and stadium-ready stomper "Stutter"; Nashville stars Lady Antebellum help out on the country ballad "Out of Goodbyes." Says Levine, "Our first record was a reflection of my love for Stevie Wonder. With the second I kept going back and forth between Prince and the Police. But there was no one on my mind for this album. It's just great pop."

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Song Stories

“Is It True”

Brenda Lee | 1964

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."

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