Jason Mraz has been making music for more than 20 years, but he’s only just made his first pop album.
On June 23, the singer/songwriter released his latest album, Mystical Magical Rhythmical Radical Ride, a 10-track collection that contains some of the dance-iest and most pop-forward songs of Mraz’s career while still asking the deep questions that have been a through line in all of his output.
Mraz recently stopped by the Billboard News studio to unpack some of the stories behind the album, including how it took heavy influence from none other than his mom.
Upon telling his mom the ideas he was considering exploring on his next project, Mraz recalls, “She said, ‘These are great, but I feel like you’ve done this before.’ She said, ‘What you need to do is make a pop album before it’s too late.’
“Those words ‘before it’s too late’ reverberated around the room,” Mraz continues, “and I thought… am I too old to make upbeat music?’ So I wanted to challenge myself and my bandmates; we all challenged each other to make this album you could dance to.”
But Mraz, who turned 46 on the day of the new album’s release, wanted to make dance music for people his age, which caused him to approach the themes of the album from a different perspective than those in a lot of mainstream pop.
“Historically, had I been doing this at a younger age, I would have been hormonally charged to try to create these dancefloor bangers,” he says, “but as you get older those moments are still precious, but it’s not what all of life is about. Sometimes life is about cheering yourself on to get through the day.”
Mystical Magical Rhythmical Radical is Mraz’s eighth studio LP and comes 21 years after his first album, Waiting for My Rocket to Come, which produced breakout hits including “The Remedy (I Won’t Worry)” and “You and I Both.”
“I think back then, it’s all I knew so I felt both like a winner, but I felt a little unworthy,” Mraz says of the starting-out days. “I felt like I was thrown into it too soon. I wasn’t fully realized in life and I was 23, 24, so I’m writing songs that are more for that age. Looking for love in all the wrong places, I guess, but still asking questions about why am I here and what is the meaning of life. I think that is the through line.
Mraz says the advice he’d give to this younger version of himself is pretty simple: “Just relax, you don’t need the tramp stamp, you can quit smoking sooner than you think, it’s gonna be OK. I was junk food and cigarettes and beer, and I was everything, every night. That’s who I was back then. I felt like I was indestructible. I wouldn’t really wake up from that for many years, probably 2007 is when I had a big transformation in my life, so that first album is a distant memory, but a joyful one.”
