Next month, Maroon 5 will perform the halftime show at the Super Bowl, which seems like a culminating moment of their long journey to become one of the biggest acts in pop music (or, at least, the biggest one that wouldn't say no to the NFL out of solidarity with Colin Kaepernick). And they're kind of a classic example of a singles-driven act whose albums aren't necessarily taken seriously, which, despite some mission drift towards more credible album artists over the years, is kind of the point of this series.

Maroon 5 deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Pantry Queen
2. Shiver
3. Through With You
4. Tangled
5. Not Coming Home
6. The Sun
7. Little Of Your Time
8. Nothing Lasts Forever
9. Can't Stop
10. Not Falling Apart
11. Kiwi
12. Secret (DJ Premier Remix)
13. Hands All Over
14. Out Of Goodbyes (with Lady Antebellum)
15. How
16. Lucky Strike
17. Ladykiller
18. Coming Back For You
19. New Love
20. Best 4 U
21. Closure

Track 1 from The Fourth World by Kara's Flowers (1997)
Tracks 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 from Songs About Jane (2002)
Tracks 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 from It Won't Be Soon Before Long (2007)
Track 12 from Call And Response: The Remix Album (2008)
Tracks 13, 14 and 15 from Hands All Over (2010)
Tracks 16 and 17 from Overexposed (2012)
Tracks 18 and 19 from V (2014)
Tracks 20 and 21 from Red Pill Blues (2017)

A year or two back, I saw a billboard for a Top 40 radio station bearing the names and faces of three people: Adele, Taylor Swift, and Adam Levine. No mention of Maroon 5 whatsoever despite the fact that Levine's musical output under his own name consists of like, a couple hit feature appearances and a soundtrack nobody bought. And it wasn't even that surprising, because Levine was always the movie star-handsome frontman, the only recognizable member of the band, and since he began starring in NBC's "The Voice" in 2011, he's basically a household name.

Maroon 5's career can effectively be bifurcated into the period before 2011, when Levine began appearing on "The Voice," and after. Maroon 5's third album Hands All Over had just more or less bricked, and they saved it with a new bonus track single, launched on "The Voice," that was less a band recording than Levine backed by programmed track from a team of pop producers. Since "Moves Like Jagger," Maroon 5's records have more or less followed the formula of that song, with a band that used to write and perform all its tracks ceding most of its work to Max Martin, Ryan Tedder, Benny Blanco, Dr. Luke, Stargate, Rodney Jerkins, Sia, Charlie Puth, Julia Michaels, Diplo, Ricky Reed, Cirkut, and many, many more. It's weird to think that a band that entered mass consciousness as a glossy Top 40 act would someday become so much more of an assembly line of cheesy pop hits that the early stuff would retroactively be considered far more authentic and well made, but that's where we are.

I wanted to kick things off with a song from Kara's Flowers, the band featuring 4/5ths of Maroon 5 that released one failed album a half decade before the Songs About Jane reboot (although The Fourth World's "My Ocean Blue" is literally a song about a Jane, I don't know if it's about the Jane). I always knew about Kara's Flowers but didn't listen to the album until recently, and I think I'd built up in my mind that they were probably actually really good back then, but it's very much one of those undistinguished bright shiny major label alt-rock records from the year that was ruled by Smashmouth and Sugar Ray. The video for the band's one single, "Soap Disco," gives off the vibe that somebody wanted them to be The Oneders from That Thing You Do! with modern production, and it's kind of embarrassing and doesn't fit Levine's voice very well. Perhaps if McG had directed their video they would've been as big as Fastball for a year, but it's definitely better for them that that didn't happen. The Fourth World has some good songs, though, "Pantry Queen" chief among them. 

Songs About Jane looms large over Maroon 5's career as their biggest selling album and is often held up as an example of 'when they were good,' but I have mixed feelings about it. The songs that weren't ubiquitous are still enjoyable, though, "Shiver" and "Tangled" kind of feel like superior versions of the taut funk rock aesthetic they were introduced to the world with on "Harder To Breathe." Totally weird trivia: before her acting breakthrough, Rashida Jones sang backup on Maroon 5's first two albums, appearing on "Tangled," "Secret," "Not Coming Home" and "Kiwi."

By far my favorite Maroon 5 album is It Won't Be Soon Before Long (and for that matter "Makes Me Wonder" is my favorite single), they were still writing and performing their music as a band but Dr. Dre/Eminem producer Mike Elizondo was an inspired choice to produce the record and give it a bigger, more bass-driven sound than Songs About Jane. And it has "Nothing Lasts Forever," the work-in-progress that Levine had used a couple years earlier as the hook for one of my favorite Kanye West songs, "Heard 'Em Say."

I also think the Mutt Lange-produced Hands All Over was a really solid record, but they were having trouble keeping the hits coming after "Makes Me Wonder"; six consecutive singles missed the top 10 before the hail mary "Moves Like Jagger." At that point, they were just firing blanks, rewriting "Every Breath You Take" on "Won't Go Home Without You" and rewriting their own "This Love" on "Misery." I'd like to play armchair A&R and say some of these deep cuts could've been better singles that would've allowed Maroon 5 to keep making records as a real band, but I'm not sure that's true outside of maybe "Not Falling Apart" sounding like a hit to me. "Little Of Your Time" is one of my favorite Maroon 5 songs precisely because it doesn't feel geared towards radio. I also wanted to show some love to Call And Response, which featured a really interesting array of producers remixing songs from their first 2 albums, kind of offering a more interesting alternative version of the band's future where maybe they made original songs with ?uestlove and Deerhoof instead of Max Martin and Shellback.

Since "Moves Like Jagger," Maroon 5 have become a lot more consistently successful but a bit more anonymous and formulaic. It's funny to think that they'd had five top 10 hits when they released an album cheekily titled Overexposed, but now they have fourteen. They're basically up there with Rihanna as one of the pop charts' few sure things. So there's a lot less to love in the later albums, but I did find some tracks that I enjoy, particularly "Lucky Strike" and "New Love." And believe me, it brings me no pleasure to report that Ryan Tedder is the MVP of Maroon 5's all-star writing/production team. And one of the few real surprises of their later albums was "Closure," the 11-minute groove workout that closes Red Pill Blues, one of the moments that suggests they're still interested in what goes on the records outside the big hit singles. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22, 2019 at 9:00 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.