It reads like a neat piece of marketing. A guy called Mraz makes an album called Mr A-Z. The title is intended to reflect the record’s wide gamut of styles and emotions – from A to Z as it were.
Jason Mraz’s second album covers a lot of bases, from the balladic ‘Mr Curiosity’ to the in-your-facedness of ‘Wordplay’ to the stop-start cleverdickery of ‘Clockwatching’.
Mraz himself puts the diverse tone down to his own shifting moods. “When I wrote ‘Mr Curiosity’ that was the only song I could have written at the time," he says. "But I’m also kinda scatterbrained. I like and need variety."
Mraz is set to tour with James Blunt, and draws an interesting distinction between their styles.
“James’ songs are mostly depressing,” he proffers. “You see him live and each song is nearly more depressing than the last. But the songs I’m most likely to leave off my albums are the depressing ones. I just could not do that, singing a bunch of downer songs all the time.”
He obviously found working with sometime U2 producer Steve Lillywhite a highly satisfying experience.
“After I’d written the songs, I worked on them with my band. I’d take a recorded version of them to Steve as a kind of map for the album. Sometimes we’d have different ideas as to how to finish a track off but he was always willing to encourage me to try anything I wanted. So we ended up with about a dozen takes for each song.”
He continues: “Sometimes it seemed hard to decide which one to go with, but often I’d just sleep on it and next morning I’d wake up and pretty well know straightaway by instinct which was the right one.”
His album cover features a few references (book spines used for track titles, a blackboard with a message on it, a quiz), which might suggest that Mraz was a bit of a swot at school, but he denies the accusation.
“Not at all. To be honest I just did enough to get by,” he recalls. “I’m not very visual in that I don’t really understand the idea of visually representing music. So I leave that to those who do. But maybe there’s a subconscious theme in that I feel I’m really a student at all this, with lots more to learn, and maybe it’s no harm to be saying to kids that they shouldn’t be in such a hurry to quit school.”
As to what he might still have to learn – he’s forthright about that too.
“I can’t make up stories so I have to write from my own personal life. I wish I could write stories the way people like The Beatles, Bob Dylan and this young American Gregory Page can do it. But I hope to learn to do it someday."
He also admits that there can be difficulties writing a positive song like ‘Life Is Wonderful’ in a world which a lot of people find to be far from wonderful.
“Yeah, that’s right,” he agrees. “But I wrote that song when there was all the warfare stuff going on and maybe in those times we need songs we can use as a place to retreat to. Writing songs like that can be a kind of therapy for me too.”
He also describes himself as an artist “unafraid to make mistakes”. So what mistakes did he make in the past?
“I suppose my biggest one was actually thinking about mistakes at all. It took me a while to learn that there’s really no right or wrong in music. But I had no confidence back then. I was scared to meet other artists and afraid to talk about my music. I had to do a little growing up.”