Memories of the Golden Days of Maroon 5 Before Their Sound Shift

Note: this blog post is composed entirely of my own opinions. It obviously should not be regarded as the sole truth about Maroon 5 if you're a fan. It simply draws from my experience coming from someone who was a literal child when they released their first album and recently listened to their latest album over twenty years later.

Giving me Queen vibes here. I also had this picture saved in my phone throughout half of high school like some fangirl lunatic. (Call and Response remix album cover)

I was re-listening to Songs About Jane during a slow period during one of my gigs and consequently got lost in a rabbit hole of listening to the demo versions as well that are on the 10th anniversary version. Back when Mickey Madden was still part of the band and James Valentine didn't even have a beard yet.

Of course, I was five or six when the album first came out (and I come from a family that blasted jazz and gospel music religiously) so it's not like I could realistically go about researching who they were. Or would do that until that "Moves Like Jagger" song came out. My mom and I bought a copy of Songs About Jane in a thrift shop a couple of years after that, finally knowing who Maroon 5 were, and I immediately got transported back to my kindergartener yellow school bus days when "This Love" played on the radio and "Must Get Out" played at track meets. (I swear they play the weirdest songs at track meets. I distinctly remember them playing "Because of You" by Kelly Clarkson one time. Like, why??) How did I go through life without knowing who sang the songs that played in the background of some of my memories?

I admittedly haven't tracked much of Maroon 5's releases since V, as I decided to get more educated about indie artists and musicians of color when I moved back to America. Even though my mom overheard a high school junior me trying to make a song on GarageBand and sat a Carlo Robelli acoustic guitar inside my doorway for me to keep and I named said guitar PJ Morton. I don't believe I've missed much, given the reviews. But I do like the song collaboration with Stevie Nicks, even if the critics don't. And I almost cried listening to "Middle Ground," even if some long-time fans find Adam's voice on it earache-inducing.

So I decided to listen to their most recent album, Love Is Like, made up of two-minute songs patchworked from samples. Let's just say I want to cry as much as I wanted to when the Patriots lost the Super Bowl last week. (And half the world thinks that the band's halftime show back performance back in 2019 made the SpongeBob halftime song "Sweet Victory" sound sophisticated in comparison.) And I'm sure some longtime listeners will agree with me. I feel like I'm back in the Kara's Flowers stage, where a good chunk of the songs sounded like cringy Beatles imitations. Only now we're hearing cheap imitations of whatever pop music trend is happening. Not sure why. They have a whole-ass talented band that can write obviously, as evidenced by the first two albums full of songs only written by the members. Love Is Like understandably did the worst charting-wise out of all the albums. I went to go look up a live performance of them jamming just to cleanse my ears.

Picture from Wix. Captures their early vibe well.

Perhaps the reason for the downshift in quality is the addition of outside demos (which they tried to rectify with this latest album but I beg to differ). Or I don't know, the muses? The tumultuous relationship with the aforementioned Jane inspired a whole album and launched their success. As did many other relationships inspire some bangers in the albums that followed. And in the case of "Makes Me Wonder," politics was the inspiration (and it won a Grammy). I figured out early on that it would harder to come up with more breakup songs to write once Adam got happily married. Even Taylor Swift, normally known for her autobiographical stuff, used her folk albums to tell a story about fictional characters.

There's already a lot of diss essays and YouTube videos on the quality shift in Maroon 5's catalog, so I'll end by saying this: I miss the music of the late 90s/early 2000s, and actually even before that (my Spotify age is 48), where stuff wasn't autotuned and electronically enhanced and bands all had their own musical identity. Last week I easily identified Adam Levine's voice playing over the speakers in CVS in "Nobody's Love," even though I'd never heard the song (and I like it). Had Maroon 5 had a different lead singer now, that wouldn't have happened, because the instrumentation of the song is so different to what plays in my memories. Even Freshlyground has a new lead singer now which throws me off because Zolani Mahola is what I grew up with. Nostalgia is real. And so is creative evolution. Both are good, but chasing trends in order to stay irrelevant isn't.

Here's a picture below of me performing "Sunday Morning" a capella at a school fundraiser back in 2014 (dang it, lost the footage. Maybe I'll record a TikTok):

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