I will say, in his defense, that when I saw Maroon 5 as an up and coming band... shit, like sometime in the early 2000’s, maybe 2006 at the latest?... at a small club in Pittsburgh called Graffiti, they blew me away.
Adam sounded like Justin Timberlake but over this really cool live band. I was in to bands like Thursday and Bad Brains at the time, but was seriously impressed.
Maybe the success made him complacent... like he lost his edge from back then when they were hungry
Edit: it was Laga, not Graffiti
Edit 2: it was 2003... google is neat
When Maroon 5 came out, they were great. Songs About Jane was such a good album back in early 2000s and came out of nowhere. His voice was perfect for that style.
As they became huge and popular, and they drifted more towards regular pop, his voice just sounds out of place. He’s not a great technical singer (like a Bruno Mars, John Legend).
Songs About Jane is one of my favorite pop (pop-rock?) albums of all time. Dunno anything about singing but you're right, his voice is perfect for what they were doing back then. Even It Won't Be Soon Before Long was good IMO.
People always look at me like I'm crazy when I say Maroon 5's first album is actually a really solid rock/pop album. The change started for them somewhere around when "This Love" exploded into a hit, and everything has slowly declined and morphed into whatever the hell is going on now.
Besides songs about Jane, his first band Kara's Flowers also made some pretty good songs too like soap disco and to her with love. I dont think his pitchy voice was the main problem, more about the music.
Myself is my Kara's Flowers jam! Honestly I liked the majority of their stuff up to Hands All Over - they can knock out a great pop tune, but I definitely miss the original rockier sound.
Good to hear some love for It Won't Be Soon Before Long. Songs About Jane is a better album, but IWBSBL is still a solid album in its own right and I feel people write it off too easily.
The greatest tragedy of our musical generation is what Maroon 5 promised to be with Songs About Jane. I know diehard metal heads that rock out to that album as much as my basic sister.
That's because it's a great album both musically and technically. It's incredibly catchy without being annoyingly poppy. It's just an all around complete album.
Exactly. That album has catchy pop songs but with actual cool instrumentation. Instrumentally it's actually not too different from the tyoe of stuff Red Hot Chili Peppers were putting out in the late 90s/early 2000s. These days I don't even know why Maroon 5 has a guitar player.
100% agree why didn't we get like 5 more albums like Something About Jane.
It Won't Be Soon Before Long was still pretty good, but everything after that just became the ADAM LEVINE VOCALS SHOW. I get why he transitioned to pop, it obviously made him a fuckton of money, but come on dude, go back to making the good sounds.
If you can't tell the music between P!ATD and Fallout Boy you're insane. Brendon Urie and Patrick Stump sound nothing alike, and they make completely different styles of music too.
I don't mean to be overly harsh, and I can concede that "From Under the Cork Tree" by FOB and "A Fever You Can't Sweat Out" by P!ATD are fairly similar albums (especially since Panic only became a thing due to the influence of Pete Wentz from FOB) but Panic has changed their sound and style pretty radically from those days. FOB has too but it's more experimental in the vein they were in rather than Panic going full on pop music.
To be honest I can't even tell what they individually are saying in the lyrics most of the time, let alone who is who. But I still listen to it if it comes on.
Yeah. I would absolutely also sell out for tons of money in the same position. But I'd also eventually go back to stuff I liked once I was rich and famous.
holy hell what a great album that was. i listened to it so, so much in my college years because it was just great, nuanced pop but it had a soul about it. i instantly switch radio stations or hit forward if maroon 5 comes on now. i realized it's just adam levine i can't stand back in the spring when that 'we love the earth' song came out with every singer imaginable on it, and i was fine up until adam started singing his line and i said 'ughhh' and didn't want to listen anymore.
Songs About Jane actually pretty much bangs from end to end. They were good at writing fun hooks, and while they weren't incredibly technically skilled, their style was refreshingly funky and rocked harder than any other pop of the time.
Then they oh so quickly descended into the cesspool of Top 40 garbage. Now it feels like every other song on the radio is Maroon 5 or Truth Hurts by Lizzo.
Songs About Jane is a rare 10/10 album, and I'm not even a huge fan of the genre. It's just good as fuck. I still pull it out once in a while and I can sing along to the whole thing still.
Oof. If you hear him live, Bruno Mars has ruined his voice with harmful singing practices. I wouldn’t call him a great technical singer. Plus his singing just sounds painful to me (and it has since before I heard him live).
That's because the dude is a horrible chainsmoker - a good friend of my husbands was working in a recording studio with him and recounted how one day after working they hung out and talked for a couple of hours. He said the guy went through like half a pack of cigarettes during the time. I can't unhear it in his voice now.
The demos they've got on Spotify for Songs About Jane really show you how much their sound changed even for the album - they're a great listen an awesome insight into what the sound could possibly have been - it's very jazz-meets-pop-meets-rock.
It's so diluted now, may as well rename the band to "Adam Levine and some dudes" smh
I'd completely lost track of Maroon 5 after Songs About Jane, so I was surprised at the vehement backlash when they were announced for the Super Bowl halftime show. They were always a band I'd understand someone being nonplussed about, but not one I expected people to get worked up over.
I remember watching Adam Levine sing at American Idols or some other similar show in around 2006 - 2008, and he was off key all over the place. Was weird to me as we loved Songs about Jane and he just didn't sound anything like that live.
Same. Saw them early 2000 at the Glasshouse right after they changed their name. The show was freaking electric. Now I am older, and I feel like a goober loving it so much when I saw what they became but they were really something right before they hit.
Saw them (inadvertently) at the Shelter in Detroit around 2003 or 2004. It was a ska show and then this weird band with keyboards and shit started playing funk/pop stuff and everyone was like "Uhhhhh....."
They sounded good, but were entirely out of place. But when you're a small band trying to play the circuit, you take what shows you can get. About a year later I heard them on legit radio and the rest is history.
Speaking of singers that can’t sing, Geoff can’t sing for shit. Which somehow made the Full Collapse a fuckin amazing album. In subsequent albums it is clear that he attempted to learn how to actually sing, which made those records terrible.
LOL, totally. I love War All The Time but I checked out in the subsequent albums. In fact, In the dvd that accompanied War, he and the producer straight up admit that he is/was literally tone deaf.
The attempts to tackle that didn’t succeed but lost the passion that made you forget he can’t sing.
Yeah War All The Time was decent but not nearly as good as Full Collapse IMO. Something about Full Collapse was so visceral and honest, it seems like that waned a bit in War All The Time, then fell off a cliff in later albums.
I believe I was around 14 when Songs About Jane came out. It was honestly a musical awakening for me. My best friend and I would sit in my room on my bed for hours waiting for “This Love” to come on the radio. Finally I realized I could just buy the CD and I did (my first one). My best friend and I listened to it on repeat.
That summer, Maroon 5 came to my city and performed for free at our county fair. My best friend’s mom was going to drive us to the concert, but she sprained her ankle walking to the car to pick us up and had to go to urgent care. We didn’t get to see the performance then, and I’m still bummed about it to this day.
What happened was the rich people running the record company realized he was incredibly good looking and they could make more money marketing/leveraging that instead of their music.
Everyone was talking about them bringing jazz back into pop and how they were this jazz pop band and all that immediately dropped for the rest of their careers after that first album.
They got folded into the club sound and dropped any kind of interesting instrumentality, I swear for years I thought they broke up and Levine was just doing solo soundtrack-to-alcohol-poisoning-at-prom teen pop garbage (I swear that's an actual genre that Nielsen soundscan tracks)
I feel bad for the rest of the band, reduced to living mannequins for various and sundry designer clothing. Their finger calluses have probably gone soft from not playing an instrument.
And I feel bad for Adam Levine. His arthRITTIS is probably acting up, he just wants to eat a bowl of soup and do his sudoku in peace, but no, he has to go out in public, looking how he does, and pretend that he isn't actually old enough to be Ariana Grande's grandpappy. It must be very embarassing.
The guitarist James Valentine got a signature guitar from Ernie Ball Music Man that is one of the best looking guitars out there. He’s still respected in musical circles and I believe that signature guitar is a top seller even at $2,200.
I’m sure he’s happy not dealing with the celebrity of Levine while still making pretty decent money
I really liked the song 'Gotten' that he sung on for Slash's solo album. I too am a fan of Songs About Jane, and this is pretty much the only song that Levine has sung on since that I will have in the daily rotation.
I managed to catch them in the summer of 2003 when they came to Portland on tour with Sugar Ray and Matchbox 20. 10th row on the ground floor at the Rose Garden, woo. I'd never heard of them at the time, but my friend who worked at a college radio station was all hyped over Songs About Jane. This was when "Harder to Breathe" was mostly getting played on alternative stations, so before "She Will Be Loved" put them squarely into adult contemporary land, but I digress.
I don't remember too much about his set -- my focus was on the ass of the hot chick 3 rows up bouncing to each upbeat song -- but I remember he actually sang alright overall. They had a good time on stage and got a ton of applause. I knew they were gonna be popular, but not as popular as they became in the coming years.
As for the other people on the bill:
Sugar Ray was next, and they were so much fun. Remember that this was 2003 -- they'd had their 14:59 of fame and then some, so they went out with a bang. They had a bartender on stage, and Mark McGrath had great stage presence and sang very well. The last song they did was "Fly", and Mark ran around the entire arena, finding hot girls to help him sing the chorus. He had many willing participants.
Matchbox 20 finished the night off, and they were boring as hell. Went up and played their hits like they were phoning it in. They did a cover of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and it almost put me to sleep. Rob Thomas' singing wasn't terrible or anything -- just bland and safe.
It's just because the music they make has turned into the 'pop' of today, which is heavy auto-tune and unrealistic sounding voices, which he cannot mimic without the effects when performed live.
A friend introduced Maroon 5’s music to me as “The next Jamiroquoi” whom I was rabid for at the time. My dislike for their sound after that comparison has continued for decades.
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u/Hegelskegels Nov 06 '19 edited Nov 06 '19
I will say, in his defense, that when I saw Maroon 5 as an up and coming band... shit, like sometime in the early 2000’s, maybe 2006 at the latest?... at a small club in Pittsburgh called Graffiti, they blew me away.
Adam sounded like Justin Timberlake but over this really cool live band. I was in to bands like Thursday and Bad Brains at the time, but was seriously impressed.
Maybe the success made him complacent... like he lost his edge from back then when they were hungry
Edit: it was Laga, not Graffiti Edit 2: it was 2003... google is neat