A Conversation with Jason Mraz

Mike Ragogna: How are you doing, Jason?

Jason Mraz: I’m good, Mike!

MR: Nice. Your new album is called Love Is a Four Letter Word, and it does seem that every song on this project has something to do with an angle that brings you back to the bigger point, which is about love.

JM: Absolutely, absolutely. You got it. Thank you for hearing that in the music. You know, I’m not trying to throw it in peoples’ faces. I’m trying to just lay it out there for it to be easily received. And always, my overall mission is just to transform someone’s moment, maybe someone’s day, or at the very best, someone’s life, and just shift the attention back to love because it’s always there. We just have to choose to see it or not.

MR: Yeah. Jason, that’s so wise. Let’s talk about the single “I Won’t Give Up.” It’s like, “Okay, we need to go through our crazy stuff or growing stuff or whatever it is, but I still love you,” and I think sometimes, we really all forget about that because we’re so wrapped up in our own thing.

JM: We are. And also we get so wrapped up in the other person that we want to possess them and own them, and we get nervous about what they might do without us, so it really is about unconditional love. No matter what happens, I’m not going to change my thoughts about you. It’s a big lesson, and it took me a long time to learn it. That song was my learning of the lesson and being able to put it down on the page and be able to sing night after night. Yes, I understand this now, and I’m ready to apply it to all relationships, especially the one I have with myself.

MR: Beautiful. And while we’re on that subject, “The Woman I Love,” the song right before that on the album, you point out how there are things that annoy us about each other, but you’re still the woman I love. I’m not going to bail on you.

JM: Right on, yeah. Yeah, you know what? Sometimes, obviously, anybody can annoy you, you know? Anybody can shift their attitude in one direction. And also, it’s like sometimes our better halves can forget their own greatness. They can become annoyed by us, or they can become annoyed in life. So it’s up to us to love them back into being the person we know them to be, you know what I mean? And we all usually do a pretty good job with this. You know, if somebody you love tries and fails at something, you don’t stop loving them. You applaud them and you pick them back up. You hope that they’d do the same for you.

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Jason Mraz: I have a darker side

Jason Mraz has revealed there is a dark side to his music - but his fans may never hear it.

The singer-songwriter, known for feel-good hits like I’m Yours and The Remedy (I Won’t Worry), said he’s recorded a ton of heavier tunes that remain on his laptop.

He chooses not to share them with fans, partly because he doesn’t want to tour with loads of sad songs.

In the process of creating the positive tunes, he says he comes up with the depressing ones first.

“I have to get a lot of out me first before I can get to that place … where I can choose to celebrate life,” he said. “It’s those celebrating songs that end up on the album.”

Mraz, 33, said he would like release his melancholy material, but is still searching for the right way to present it.

He has an eight-year-old song that he calls both “beautiful” and “heavy”, and he’s re-working it so that it may one day be released.

“I’d rather uplift and inspire, and you can also do that in darker tunes,” he said. “I have to carefully place those and I feel the fewer, the better.”

His new album, Love Is A Four Letter Word, has its more serious moments. I Won’t Give Up, the first single and US Billboard Top 10 hit, is about his break-up from his fiancee, which he wrote to help him figure out what was going on in his life.

“I knew there were some things I believed in that I didn’t want to give up on, and this song was proof to me that I was working through it,” he said.

Happy 17th of April!

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