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The acoustic pop star talks about playing nylon-string guitar, songwriting games, and the importance of wordplay.
JASON MRAZ is a certified international pop star these days, with multiplatinum sales and a string of hit singles, but his heart is in the coffeehouse. For proof, just spin his 2001 album Live at Java Joe's, which captures Mraz with percussionist Toca Rivera at the storied Southern California venue that also helped launch the career of Jewel. On that small stage, Mraz is in his element - singing and scatting through jazzy pop songs, nimbly grooving on acoustic guitar, delivering rapidfire lyrics full of verbal mischief, and riffing off the crowd like a stand-up comic. In the years since, his instrumental palette and his audience has grown immensely thanks to songs like 'The Remedy (I Won't Worry)," the reggae-tinged "I'm Yours," and "Lucky" with Colbie Caillât (for a transcription, see page 54), but the basic elements are die same. Strip away the production, and you have a guy with an acoustic guitar who arrives on trie no-frills live experience.
Along the way Mraz, now 33, has helped inspire a wave of songwriters playing upbeat acoustic pop colored with light jazz chords and swaying grooves. Few, however, can match Mraz's brainy wit as a lyricist, tossing off multilayered puns and words like volition and disfigured without missing a beat. In "Wordplay" (from Mr. A-Z), a tongue-in-cheek song about record-biz survival, he builds to a chorus hook of "La la la la love," briefly echoes "We're Off to See the Wizard" with the line "die wonderful thing it does because because," and then tags it by calling himself "the wizard of oohs and ahs and fa-la-las / Yeah, the Mr. A to Z / They say I'm all about the wordplay." As in many Mraz songs, the puns come so fast and thick that close lyric-sheet reading is required to catch them all.
This year, Mraz is writing and recording the follow-up to his blockbuster We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things., once again working with producer Martin Terefe (KT Tunstall) and the Kensaltown Kings, from London. Behind the scenes, one of the keys to Mraz's creative process is a songwriters' group shepherded by Bob Schneider of Austin,...