Maroon 5’s career did not have the most auspicious start; in truth, it didn’t even begin as Maroon 5. Instead, the five-piece who went on to top charts with ‘debut’ album Songs About Jane and mega-hit single She Will Be Loved started their collective musical life under a different name, with a completely different sound.
As Kara’s Flowers in the mid-1990s, Adam Levine and co. battled under the weight of the post-grunge boom in loud and abrasive rock music. Their debut, The Fourth World, was by comparison a straight-up pop-based release, which satisfied neither punters nor band members alike, and saw them disappear into the malaise of also-rans.
Maroon 5 came together organically, as the original band reformed with an added member after a couple of year’s break after Kara’s Flowers wound up. After the members headed to different colleges around the United States to further their education, Maroon 5 made Songs About Jane in a bubble.
Soon the bubble burst, and the band was propelled to stardom worldwide, before taking a long and deserved break to rest, regroup, and write a new album.
“It feels great; it feels very natural,” opines Levine of the band’s return to the musical world. “We’ve been gone long that that we don’t feel over-exposed and we feel welcomed back. We took a nice hiatus but we’re ready to go again.”
The frontman says that the sabbatical was the best thing the band could do for themselves, allowing time to write and record It Won’t Be Soon Before Long. “We had so much that we wanted to accomplish and we knew that if we wanted to do it properly then we needed to take some time to do it,” he says. “All inclusive, writing, recording, and tweaking and producing everything took about a year.”
We were really interesting in making the ‘right’ record,” he outlines of what the band wanted to achieve with their second release. “It was so important to us as people tend to ride the wave and treat the music as a secondary thing, but we’re much more interested in making music that we love to play than anything else.
“You have to take time, you have to,” Adam adds emphatically.
Following up an album like Songs About Jane is filled with pressure – every time a band knocks it out of the park on their debut then the follow-up to a mega-hit release comes with pressures from external sources – record companies counting their bottom lines – and internal ones – the band wanting to make a better album than their debut. It’s something that, Adam says, Maroon 5 feel to actually be the other way around, with greater pressure placed upon their debut than It Won’t Be Soon Before Long.
“Whenever the question is asked about the pressure factor my response honestly is that when we were making our first album with very little time and very little money and everything for the next ten years or perhaps even the rest of our lives was contingent upon the success of our first record.
“THAT to me is all pressure,” he says emphatically. By comparison, having a second release ready to “…is all fun – we’ve already established ourselves and had some good luck and all those things have fallen into place. Now is the time that we get to roll with it and enjoy ourselves making music. That’s the goal. The pressure is nothing like it was the first time around; we knew that if that hadn’t worked out and this whole thing hadn’t worked we probably would have thrown in the towel.”
The spotlight as a frontman of a famous band is something that Levine admits he struggled with on occasion and something that he was able to channel into the new release. “There’s nothing inherently wrong with enjoying attention or success,” he says of the tabloid focus that comes with being linked to the likes of Jessica Simpson. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” he grins. “They can link me to whoever they like. It’s flattering.”
The songwriting process was turned on its head for It Won’t Be Soon Before Long – where Songs About Jane delved into the relationship with the titular character, the band’s follow-up paints from a broader palette of experiences, all couched in the familiar tales of boy-meets-girl-problems-ensue.
“I definitely use the metaphor of a relationship because as a human being I grapple with these things quite a bit as most people do,” he says. “So I consider myself a representative on behalf of all people in relationships, but I tried to generalise a bit more. It’s not about one person or a girl all the time and it’s more about my life over the past couple of years, and obviously things have changed quite a bit. It shows that.”
Musically, he believes that the new album offers something slightly different, taking Maroon 5 to the next level of what they have to offer the world. In making it, the band locked themselves away. “We shut everything out so it could be as pure a process as possible,” Adam explains. “Obviously there are creative battles that we fight with each other but at the end of the day we know it’s not personal – we want to battle it, and it’s almost like we locked ourselves in a room and knew that we were going to come out with something that we loved, and we also knew at the same time that it wasn’t going to be easy.”
“It never is,” he continues. “If it’s too easy then the album is usually crap.”
Maroon 5’s It Won’t Be Soon Before Long is out now.
