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Jason Mraz is in the lounge of Elektra Records kneeling in front of a coffee table stacked with a pack of sharpies and well over 100 posters. The posters show Mraz sitting on a bench, looking off to the side and holding his head in his hands. You might notice that he's got a case of hat hair but no hat in sight and only the makings of a smile, weary yet obliging. If there were one thing Mraz was determined not to change in the transition from San Diego (his adopted home) coffeehouse singer to major-label recording artist (his debut, Waiting for My Rocket to Come, is out on Elektra), it was that he would not take off his hat.
"I was at a Frosty Freeze and just for a second I took my hat off and the photographer was like, 'Oh just hang on for a second,'" Mraz says, just a touch of his native Virginia lilt escaping. Mraz signs each poster in a big bubbly scrawl. On some he draws hearts here and there, while on others he draws the point of an arrow and the tail feather on either side of his head. "I said, 'Come on, I can be the hat guy!' Even in my second-grade picture in my yearbook I always had a hat on. It's like my security blanket. And of course out of 800 photos they took, this is the only one where I didn't have a hat on. They beat me," he says in mock defeat and then continues signing the posters.
Don't expect Mraz to get too wound up. He is the perfect combination of his southern upbringing, friendly and mannered, and southern California coming of age, positive and open-minded. Be it at the coffeehouse or on the front porch, there's a shared philosophical state between the two worlds, unhurried and easy, and his music resides in that space as well.
Between Mechanicsville, Virginia, and San Diego, was a journey that involved musical theater, a stint in a Fame-like New York school, a run-in with a Central Park psychic, some time in college, Field of Dreams-like voices and Willie Nelson.
"I was Joseph in my Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat. I was Snoopy. I was in A Christmas Carol," Mraz says, rattling off his list of roles in high school productions. "But I didn't have the academics to get in to any other college and one thing I wanted to do was get the hell out of my town," he says.
Mraz did get out of his town, attending the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York. The only remaining trace of the experience, and what sets Mraz's apart from his contemporaries, is the pure clarity of his vocals. Jason Mraz can sing. Really sing. From the ballad "Who Needs Shelter," to the traces of skat on "No Stopping Us" to the rap delivery on "The Remedy," Mraz moves from each style with the perfect harmony of a singer trained to carry the melody and craft of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical across a theater.
The acting and dancing components of his education, however, didn't cut it. Mraz took up the guitar with the modest dream that "at best, by the time I'm forty, I'll rock." He began writing songs and busking around New York until the run-in with the psychic.
"It's your average day in Central Park," Mraz says, breaking from the posters. "This guy was going around reading people's palms, and I'm totally into that stuff. So I went up and shoved my palm in his face and he grabs it, does the Dead Zone type of thing and calls me 'youth' -- I love it. 'Youth, youth, you need to get experience. You need to stop asking questions, avoid the questioner.' And I'm like, 'Yeah!' I don't know what I was on that day or what he was on, but it worked. I thought, 'He's right. Why do I waste time asking myself questions when I know the answer?'"
The answer was Virginia, where he enrolled in a local college and lasted two months -- just in time for the arrival of an urgent voice and a loan check of a "healthy amount." "I heard this voice that said, 'Go to California.' It was freaky -- that Field of Dreams wake up in bed type of sound. But, remembering the psychic, I couldn't ask myself why. So I'm in my truck and on the freeway to California. Literally, I'm crying all the way there. I'm in Texas. I've been driving for twenty hours straight and I'm listening to my Forrest Gump soundtrack and Willie Nelson's 'On the Road Again' comes on.
"I've heard that song a million times -- [singing] 'On the road again/Life I love is making music with my friends/I can't wait to get on the road again' -- but it came on, and I just lost it. I'd never heard that song in that way before. I put it on repeat all the way through Texas. The more I listened to it, the more emotional I got."
And after two years of playing the coffeehouses in San Diego, Mraz's terrain expanded to Los Angeles, eventually reaching the ears of the music industry. But when it came time to record his debut, he went back to Virginia and hooked up with John Alagia, the producer of the Dave Matthews Band's debut Remember Two Things. Alagia was mixing DMB's Busted Stuff when Mraz walked into the same studio.
"He'd produced all my favorite albums as a kid, and he's from where I grew up," says Mraz. "I was like, 'Whoa, this guy's almost too perfect.'"
It was Alagia who suggested that Mraz use the Agents of Good Root, the Virginia roots-rock quartet that just happened to have been Mraz's favorite in high school, as his backing band for the album. "I left town in Virginia to be inspired, to basically become an agent of good root," Mraz says. "When it went full circle, it was like a dream come true."
It's impossible to listen to Mraz sing the lyric "I won't worry my life away" in the chorus to "The Remedy," a song about his friend's successful recovery from cancer, and not see Mraz as an agent of good root. In the singer-songwriter market, where brooding and heartbreak are king, Mraz is unabashedly positive. But he tells his own story best on "Curbside Prophet," an account of his cross-continental journey set to a country swing. "I'm just a curbside prophet/With my hands in my pocket/Waiting for my rocket to come," Mraz sings with absolute trust that the right thing will happen at the right time.
"I have deja vu all the time. I think that's fate's way of saying you're on the right track. I always knew I would do this. I didn't know what it would look like in a picture or on an album," Mraz says, holding up one of the posters he's just signed, "but I knew fate wouldn't let me down."
See an exclusive performance of "The Remedy"
CHRISTINA
SARACENO
(February 13, 2003)