Maroon 5 has had to cope with lengthy gaps between albums ever since its 2002 breakthrough Songs about Jane became a single-spawning sensation in the years following that disc’s release. It took five years before they could follow it up with It Won’t Be Soon Before Long, and now it has been nearly another three for the L.A. quintet’s latest effort, Hands All Over, to meet the masses. (It dropped Sept. 21.)
Not surprisingly, as James Valentine pointed out during a recent phone interview, the band is simply happy to have new music out.
“It’s always a long process for us,” he says of the group’s recording schedule. “We take our sweet time, but now we have more songs to play at our shows.”
Obviously their gigs had set parameters at the start. “We were limited,” he recalls, “especially when we were touring with our first record forever, because we had no choice with a setlist — we could basically just play our record, and at a certain point we’d have to figure out covers to do. Even with the second record, to only have two albums to choose songs from is obviously not as good as having three. Now we can put together a pretty sick set of all songs that people are really into, and we don’t have to put any filler in there.”
Maroon 5 will try out some of that new material — including its current single “Misery” — on hometown fans this weekend with two nights at the Greek Theatre, Friday and Saturday. It’s an ideal setting for the band, fronted by vocalist and rhythm guitarist Adam Levine and including keyboardist Jesse Carmichael, bassist Michael Madden and drummer Matt Flynn. For Valentine especially, these back-to-back gigs are almost literally like playing in the backyard.
“I walk by the Greek on most days,” he says. “I go up there to play tennis across from (the venue) or I go hiking through Griffith Park. I should walk there for the shows just for the sake of saying that I did that.”
As for the development of the new disc, Valentine explains that before heading over to Switzerland to record Hands All Over with producer Mutt Lange — the former Mr. Shania Twain, known for bringing his polish to classics and commercial monsters from the likes of AC/DC, Def Leppard, the Cars, Bryan Adams and Nickelback — the band had already laid down rough demos at its home studio in early 2009. Most of that original material made it through to the final cut, though some songs, like “Out of Goodbyes,” featuring country group Lady Antebellum, blossomed in the midst of the recording process.
“Jesse and I were outside one day looking over Lake Geneva, and we were strumming the guitar, and Mutt walked by and said, ‘That sounds nice. Run inside and lay that down.’ So we had the bare bones of the song, and Adam came in, and the song just wrote itself fairly quickly. It was one of those songs that just came out. Sometimes we labor months or years over a song but this one took like half an hour.”
Once the song was recorded, Lange suggested they add a female vocal. He made some calls and Lady Antebellum, spotlighting singer Hillary Scott, was on board. “They did a great job,” Valentine says. “We sent them over the files and they got them back to us quickly. It’s weird because we haven’t even met them in person. Technology is so weird.”
The album artwork for Hands All Over, which features a nude woman on a bed with two pairs of arms and hands embracing her, has also gotten a good deal of attention. After struggling to reach a unanimous decision within the band on what the cover should look like, Valentine says their manager Googled “hands all over” and an image similar to the one that appears on the album came up. Maroon 5 then reached out to English photographer Rosie Hardy, also the woman in the photo, to re-create the image specifically for this release.
The album dropped the same day as country powerhouse Zac Brown Band’s sophomore work, You Get What You Give. To help drum up sales, Levine offered to give away his personal Harley-Davidson Forty-Eight chopper to one of the band’s fans if the album debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top 200 albums chart.
“When we were thinking of ways to promote the record, that came up as a joke,” Valentine recalls. “I can’t believe he actually did it, but he has a few Harleys so I guess the loss wouldn’t be too severe — but still. We’d really like to be No. 1, so maybe this will help a bit. Zac Brown Band, though, they came out of nowhere and now they’re breathing down our necks — they’re amazing, though.”
Maroon 5 didn’t quite topple that group this time; ZBB’s album took the top spot last week. So Levine’s bike is safe. Yet, even if they weren’t able to land the top honor, Valentine says the band is extremely proud of this particular effort.
“I think it’s got a level of professionalism, just in terms of the craft of the production and the writing of the songs, that maybe isn’t there on the other two albums. That’s because of Mutt. He is so experienced. He’s a veteran. He’s done so many amazing things and we learned a lot from his process, and I think you can hear that in the record.”
After a start tonight at Santa Barbara Bowl, Maroon 5 next perform Friday and Saturday at the Greek Theatre, 2700 N. Vermont Ave., in Los Angeles. OneRepublic and Ry Cuming open. Tickets, including fees, are $48.60-$77.70. Also catch them Oct. 16 at San Diego State’s Viejas Arena, $28.50-$106.25, including fees.
With a third album under its belt, Maroon 5 gears up for another tour with Greek gigs this weekend is a post from: Soundcheck