If you're looking for the chillaxing vibes of Jason Mraz, you'll have to turn to his
social media, where he spends his time roller skating and hating on a famous ex-president.
Keep watching to find out why you haven't heard much from the singer-songwriter lately.
After an impressive run of five consecutive Top 10 albums, Jason Mraz's seventh studio
effort, 2020's Look for the Good, failed to crack the Billboard 200.
So why did so many fans suddenly seem to jump ship en masse?
A new musical direction may have been the root cause.
Mraz's sound has always flirted with reggae, though at the lighter, watered-down end of
the spectrum.
However, in 2020, he decided to show that his love of the genre extended beyond Bob
Marley's greatest hits.
So to help pull off the record, he recruited dancehall star Sister Carol and producer Michael
Goldwasser, who's known for his work with roots reggae legends Toots and the Maytals
and Steel Pulse.
Not everyone was on board with this vision, though.
Album of the Year calculated Look for the Good's critic score as 60 out of 100, while
its user score was a rather weak 44.
Users described the album as "painfully uninteresting" and the lyrics as "awfully cheesy."
Nevertheless, Mraz still seems determined to continue in this direction, as he told
The San Diego Union-Tribune that he plans to convert much of his back catalog, quote,
"through the new reggae machine" and record a second album steeped in the Jamaican sound.
At the peak of his popularity, Mraz appeared as the musical guest on the January 31, 2009
episode of Saturday Night Live.
But since then, the only other times his name has cropped up on the late-night comic institution
has been as a punchline.
In a November 2021 episode, guest host Kieran Culkin played Mraz in a Dionne Warwick talk
show sketch, and he wasn't exactly introduced in the kindest of terms.
As Warwick, cast member Ego Nwodim announced:
"Now for our next guest.
This man is not famous anymore, he does not have any songs out.
Please welcome Jason Mraz."
Culkin as Mraz at least acknowledged that this was a rather harsh way of being welcomed
onto the stage.
But things didn't get much better, as Nwodim's Warwick immediately steered the topic of conversation
to bigger names like Kanye West and Rihanna.
["I'm sorry, can you ask me questions about me?"
And back in a 2013 SNL episode, Mraz was impersonated by Joseph Gordon-Levitt for a sketch called
"The Mellow Show," which also took aim at fellow laidback troubadours like Jack Johnson
and Dave Matthews.
The current appetite for avocados has been a boon for Jason Mraz, as he owns a five-and-a-half
acre farm dedicated to the crop.
In 2004, he purchased a ranch in Bonsall, California.
As he later told Eating Well, he hoped it would be:
"A place to be isolated when you have a crazy life."
But Mraz soon developed an interest in living off the land, which also boasts pomegranates,
mangoes, guavas, and Meyer lemons.
He eventually became something of an accidental farmer, even growing his own coffee arabica
beans.
Mraz's farming duties have also informed how he approaches his day job.
As he explained to The Coast News Group in 2021,
"I would come home from tour and I would put my hands in the earth and watch something
grow.
It kind of introduced me to the patience of a long project [...] you have to surrender
to earth pace.
It helped me do that in my creative art as well.
[…] I’ve got a lot of musical ideas, album ideas, show ideas, but they don’t need to
be done today.
I can just nurture those ideas"
"Do you ever sing to your crops?"
"Oh, absolutely."
Mraz hasn't reached the upper reaches of the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 since the one-two punch
of "I Won't Give Up" and "93 Million Miles" in 2012.
But he doesn't sound too concerned that his hit-making days appear to be behind him.
In fact, he plans to eventually quit being a cog in the music industry machine.
In a 2018 interview with Evening Standard, he claimed that he wanted to get out of the
rat race before it consumed him, as he explained,
"What's left for me to achieve is to walk away from it all.
I see a lot of people grow old doing it and a lot of people get frustrated and I don't
want to live my life like that."
But that doesn't necessarily mean that Mraz wants to give up his musical talents altogether,
as he made sure to note,
"I feel like I have been given an extraordinary opportunity to give [music] a shot and have
incredible success.
I love being of service through song.
I feel like the next phase of my life will be using music for the power of good instead
of the power of product."
Mraz made his name by crafting songs designed to make you forget about the worries of the
world.
More than a decade after the release of his signature hit "I'm Yours," he still appears
determined to maintain a sunny disposition at all times.
But in an era when artists are expected to bare their souls, it's an approach that may
have become detrimental to his chart prospects.
Mraz hasn't always been entirely averse to getting real, though.
In response to Donald Trump's election, he experimented with harder-edged material, but
the perplexed crowd reaction on tour made him realize he should stay in his lane.
As he explained to Billboard in 2018,
"Nobody wants to get their bad news from Jason Mraz.
Nobody wants to hear Jason Mraz having a bad day."
Mraz might prefer to keep the positive vibes going in his music, but he's not afraid to
tell it like it is in interviews.
As he put it to Billboard,
"I mean, life sucks [...] We inherit a gnarly history.
Everybody wakes up in this world totally f---ed.
Unless your parents have a billion dollars."
In 2018, Mraz courted a little bit of controversy during an interview with Billboard about the
poem he wrote in which he revealed his bisexuality.
The blowback wasn't anything to do with his orientation, but rather, with his unfortunate
choice of words.
He revealed that his wife Christina had given him a nickname after discovering that his
position on the Kinsey scale, a tool for measuring sexual orienation, often fluctuated.
As he explained,
"She calls it 'Two Spirit,' which is what the Native Americans call someone who can
love both man and woman.
I really like that."
But many readers were quick to point out that this particular term should only apply to
Indigenous North American and First Nations people.
Native Peoples Magazine editor Taté Walker, for one, tweeted,
"Non-Natives who try to co-opt Two Spirit as some trendy term their wives just picked
out of the air are perpetuating settler violence tribal people — especially Indigenous queers
and trans folx — have endured and survived for centuries."
Mraz eventually expressed remorse, as he tweeted in response,
"I apologize for misunderstanding and mis-using the term Two Spirit.
Thank you for the correction."
Jason Mraz is still very much an active singer-songwriter, but many of his projects are now a little
more obscure than they used to be.
While earlier collaborators included fellow hitmakers like Travie McCoy, Hunter Hayes,
and Christina Perri, his more recent partners have included the relatively unknown Rebecca
Jade and Reneé Dominique.
And then there's the song he contributed to a film about mushrooms.
Yes indeed, in 2020 Mraz recorded "Disco Sun" for Fantastic Fungi: Reimagine, a soundtrack
album to the feature-length documentary Fantastic Fungi: The Magic Beneath Us.
That's the sort of decision that doesn't exactly scream "Number One smash."
Mraz appears to be a keen advocate of the humble mushroom and its psychedelic powers
in particular.
That was especially clear during his appearance on the TBS game show Celebrity Show-Off, when
he made an amusing video in which he tripped out after consuming a mushroom that he'd grown
on his farm.
You might be seeing Jason Mraz that much on traditional media lately, but you may well
have stumbled across him on the social media phenomenon that is TikTok.
While he was unable to hit the road during the COVID pandemic, he spent a significant
amount of 2020 performing his songs from the comfort of his own bedroom.
As he explained to People Magazine,
"I like to go on at midnight and do an hour set on TikTok, just as a way to practice and
engage with fans and be weird [...] And it's fun, but the reality is that it's me alone
in my room, which is also sad."
Mraz has racked up an impressive number of followers on the app: over 600,000, as of
December 2021.
And TikTok's not the only youth-oriented pursuit this 40-something developed an interest in
during his enforced break from touring, as he's also gotten into roller skating.
As he told People,
"I just started skating in my driveway, skating down at the beach, just anywhere where there
weren't too many people.
And it put a different energy in my body, which was very similar to live performance."
Chances are you have actually heard Mraz's famously optimistic music in the recent past,
even if it's not a song that he's released within the last decade.
He hasn't had a major hit since 2012, but it's the one from four years earlier that's
still racking up all the streams.
2008's "I'm Yours" is part of an exclusive club of 2000s hits that have surpassed the
1 billion play mark on Spotify, and Mraz was pretty stoked when he pulled off the feat.
He took to Facebook to show off the plaque he received for the milestone, telling his
followers,
"Unboxing 1B Spotify streams.
Thank you for listening to my jams."
Incredibly, "I'm Yours" has since gone on to add another 200 million-plus plays to its
tally.
In stark contrast, the most-played track from his 2020 album Look for the Good hasn't come
anywhere close to the number of plays of his signature tune, and the majority of that album's
songs haven't yet even reached the 1-million mark.
Mraz has never been one to directly address politics in his music.
So it stands to reason that at least a portion of his audience were probably conservative-leaning
and entirely unaware that he's at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Not anymore, though.
After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Mraz went out of his way to make his
political leanings crystal-clear.
In a 2018 interview with The New Statesman, for example, he admitted,
"I guess in the last couple of years, there have been more sucky days than usual, especially
with Donald Trump.
Trump is America's answer to Kim Jong-un."
Mraz also made his feelings clear in the wake of news that the Trump administration would
make vital cuts to the U.S. Postal Service and therefore its capacity to handle mail-in
voting ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Mraz, who once worked alongside his father in the USPS, told his Instagram followers,
"Tampering with elections is illegal.
So is mail fraud.
You or I would go to prison for it.
Let's make sure the postmaster general and our President are held accountable for their
actions, starting with a personnel change in the People's House."
Mraz may no longer be the ubiquitous hitmaker he once was, but he's still determined to
inspire a new generation to take his place.
So in 2021, he teamed up with interactive music service Yousician to help launch a new
tutorial project called Spotlight.
The initiative allows artists to help budding musicians learn the tricks of the trade, by
revealing secrets about their songwriting and studio and stage experiences and offering
personalized lessons relating to their biggest hits.
Mraz explained to Music Week what inspired him to add teaching to his list of talents,
as he revealed,
"I've partnered with Yousician because I hope that anyone at any age feels that now is the
right time to learn.
Yousician makes it so easy to learn and play.
It's like having a friend to personally guide you on your musical journey."
"When you play music, it's a bit of like a magic trick, where you shift from just speaking
to soaring."
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