It’s a miracle that we’re here at all / This mystical, magical, rhythmical, radical ride, Jason Mraz croons on the pop-infused dance track “Disco Sun.” The fifth song on his eighth studio album, “Disco Sun” showcases the singer/songwriter at his finest: embracing positivity through rose-colored glasses with a catchy beat that begs the listener to dance along.
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Mraz embraces his pop roots throughout Mystical Magical Rhythmical Radical Ride. The 10-track project sees the two-time Grammy winner reunite with Los Angeles-based band Raining Jane and producer Martin Terefe for one of Mraz’s most personal releases.
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Much of the album was written with Raining Jane (Mai Sunshine Bloomfield, Rebecca Emily Gebhardt, Chaska Potter, and Mona Tavakoli) on songwriting retreats and recorded in Nashville, New York, and Los Angeles. Mraz says the opening track, aptly titled “Getting Started,” and album closer “If You Think You’ve Seen It All” serve as bookends to the overall theme of questioning his life purpose.
“As with writing any next song, you have to wonder, ‘OK, what’s my purpose?’” he tells American Songwriter. “A song like ‘Getting Started’ really echoes that need for purpose and answers, ‘Well, who am I now? I don’t know, but I trust that by what I’ve done in my past I will make it through another day.’
“A lot had changed for me,” he continues. “I’ve never written an album in my mid-40s before, continued to have relationship awareness and triumph over my past. Surviving the pandemic. Various little benchmarks of life nudged this song forward.”
Songs like the reflective “Little Time” has Mraz looking at what he hopes to accomplish. He sees the track as the album’s anchor and admits that COVID-19 made him wonder what else is out there.
On the day I turned 42
I start thinkin’ about all I still want to do
I’ve had thousands of hours and chances to do them
Do dreams disappear if I don’t get to them today?
Are these my best days or am I only half away
To living my dreams
Time be kind to me
“We have to choose the circumstances that we got, and by doing so, it does bring about a lot of healing,” he says. “Looking forward, it’s still so full of hope and optimism and wishing and dreaming, and I love that I can accept all my failures.”
On “Little Time” Mraz sings, I’m ready to dream a new dream. So, what is his new dream?
“Part of me just wants to build birdhouses forever. That would be a success if I had my own little Etsy shop and I was building birdhouses for people,” he says with a laugh. “My new dream is a kaleidoscope of dreams. There are so many little fragments of wonder inside the new dream.
“Part of that kaleidoscope is playing more piano,” he adds. “I’ve been playing a lot more piano, and I love discovering my old songs through piano because I wrote 99 percent of my catalog on guitar. … To me, that’s been a dream come true, is to learn more about music and to experience music in new ways so that music doesn’t get old.”
One of those songs was “Irony of Loneliness.” Mraz paged through poetry books during the pandemic and stumbled upon a poem by Rupi Kaur that read, the irony of loneliness is that we all feel it at the same time—together.
“It just floored me,” Mraz recalls. “I love when a poet can say so much with so little words. Or say the obvious, that’s like, ‘Wow, how come I never thought of that?’ That’s what songwriters love to do: just salivate all over each other’s wordplay or eloquence.”
Mraz and Raining Jane penned “Irony of Loneliness” around the idea in Kaur’s poem. He then reached out to the poet to share his demo and asked if she would allow the use of her poem in his song.
“It turns out she does allow it and that I’m not the first to do it, but I’m the first to ask permission,” he says. “It felt great that she gets to be included now in the songwriting family, whereas before she was only a global phenom poet.”
Songs like the upbeat “You Might Like It,” “I Feel Like Dancing,” and “Feel Good Too” further highlight Mraz’s optimistic life outlook. “I’m a big fan of positive articulation, positive language, positive affirmations,” he says while describing “You Might Like It,” a song he initially started in 2011. “I think all of that feeds our souls in such a positive way that I like to include that in lyrics as well.
“This album really is about the passage through time, where we are in time and space. It’s about life. It’s about dreaming about the future. It’s got a lot of magic in it.”
Photo by Shervin Lainez
