For the past couple of years,
following the release of his fifth studio album, Yes!, the 41-year-old singer
has been figuring out how his music, his passion and his purpose could align to
continue to inspire others. Now, with the upcoming release of his latest LP,
Know, Mraz is doing just that, but it wasn’t an easy ride.
“I was starting to get a bit
nervous that I didn’t know what the world needed,” Mraz tells ET exclusively
over the phone about the difficulties he encountered during the process of
creating Know. “Or that I didn’t know what I even had to offer.”
What Mraz does have to offer is an
abundance of positivity and love that his fans connect with through his songs.
But to get there, he says, he needed to have his "heart broken wide
open."
“To write an album, my experience
every time is, you have to have your heart broken wide open,” Mraz explains.
“Sometimes that feels good. Like with the Yes! album, it felt really good
because I realized the album was the culmination of my love affair with Raining
Jane [the indie-rock-folk band who he’s been working with since 2007], and we
had all the songs available to us because we’d always been writing. And that
was really the kind of heart-opening where you feel like you fall in love.”
“This time was many different
things, because I felt like the musical landscape had changed, just in popular
music,” he explains, adding that he was consistently experimenting.
"Trying all sorts of things, but not really getting anywhere. And then the
election happened and I didn’t really know how to come out and sing songs that
say ‘Everything’s OK’ when suddenly the world is revealing just how divided it
is. So I didn’t really know how to continue to have my gay parade down the
middle of the street while there was serious debate happening...I felt guilty
for probably the entire 2016 to 2017. I felt guilty for wanting to stay
positive.”
Mraz instead took time to
understand who he was, continuing to write, trying to give people the
soundtrack to the most special moments of their lives. After delivering a slew
of songs to Atlantic Records, A&R David Silverstein went through his body
of work and curated what he thought was “a nice collection of love letters,” as
Mraz describes it.
“I’m grateful to [Silverstein]
because I honestly didn’t know where I was going,” confesses Mraz. “I had all
these different ideas, but they were almost a bunch of weeds in my garden and I
didn’t really know what I was growing. And David went through it, like a
gardener, and sort of picked the flowers. That was very helpful to me because I
was starting to get a bit down.”
“I was starting to get a bit
nervous that I didn’t know what the world needed or that I didn’t know what I
even had to offer,” he says. “So my heart was starting to get a bit broken because
of time, and because of rejection, and this somber feeling across the country
with all this bad news.”
There were ups and downs, a “big
pool of rejected material,” he says. “But it’s not that those songs are
rejected, necessarily, it's just that those songs were what it took to get to
the other songs. Those were the prototypes and the version two and version
three before you get to the ‘Oh, how can I make a more joyful chorus?’”
The album, he previously told ET,
is also a "an album of love letters that I wrote mostly to my wife, but
also to myself to constantly remind myself that love is still the answer."
With Know, Mraz delivers heartfelt
songs that give people hope and makes them believe in love again. His first
single, “Have It All,” was inspired by a 2012 trip to the Southeast Asian
country of Myanmar. There, he came across the common greeting “Tashi Delek,”
which translates to “may you have auspiciousness and causes of success.” That
phrase is included in the feel-good lyrics and was a catalyst for Mraz to help
the world heal and move forward.
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