‘I thought I’d be done at 40’: Jason Mraz’s new album Mystical Magical Rhythmical Radical Ride proves him wrong
- Mraz’s eighth album takes a surprise left turn with several dance-pop and vintage disco songs inspired in part by artists like Michael Jackson and The Bee Gees
- ‘I don’t think I’ve had a midlife crisis just yet,’ he says. “But maybe I have – and I haven’t lived long enough past it to see that’
Now 46, multi-Grammy Award-winner Jason Mraz was born in 1977 – the same year Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Jerry Lee Lewis, then 42, released his melancholic country-music single “Middle Age Crazy”.
Almost no one listening to Mraz’s often buoyant new album, Mystical Magical Rhythmical Radical Ride, will be reminded of Lewis belting out such high-octane 1950s rock classics as “Great Balls of Fire” and “High School Confidential”.
But there are clear thematic similarities between some of Mraz’s musically upbeat new album and the downbeat “Middle Age Crazy”, on which the now-deceased Lewis reflected: “And today he’s 40 years old, going on 20 / Don’t look for the grey in his hair / ‘Cause he ain’t got any.”
“I thought I’d be done at 40,” says Mraz, who – six years later – has responded to middle-age with a surprise left turn.
Half the songs on Mystical Magical Rhythmical Radical Ride embrace dance-pop and vintage disco. They were inspired, in part, by such Mraz favourites as Chic, Michael Jackson, Donna Summer, The Bee Gees and Jamiroquai.
“When I was a little kid, I saw being in your 40s as old age,” Mraz says. “As a teen, my 20s were something to aspire to – 40 always seemed just out of reach. I thought I’d be done [with music] by then and the ideal life would be a family, kids and moving on.
