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Mraz happily
acknowledges that
he’s well known for
“wedding songs and friendship
songs,
and remind
you to live in the moment
and
.”
Asked to trace his musical evolution from childhood,
Mraz points to the kind of perfectly whimsical inspiration
that frames his career:
e Muppet Movie.
“You know, Fozzie,
Kermit, Gonzo singing your favorite songs,” he says. (Come
to think of it, who wouldn’t want to hear
his
covers of “Mo-
vin’ Right Along” and “ e Rainbow Connection”?) Mraz,
, turned two years old in
, the year Jim Henson’s classic
musical comedy was released, so it makes sense that his earliest
memories seem more tied to the songs than to the actual lm.
“My grandmother had
e Muppet Movie
sheet music on
her piano,” Mraz recalls. “I could fake along with it because
I knew those songs well enough, singing them, and then
starting to assign those notes to the piano. So at an early
age— , , years old—I started to put things togeth-
er. en my mom started to show me chords on
the piano.”
Growing up in Mechanicsville, VA, a suburb
of Richmond, Mraz continued to show early
signs of talent. “I started harmonizing with
songs on the radio, everything from Air
Supply to Queen to Michael Jackson,” he says.
His taste naturally expanded as he got older,
which led to him making more musical con-
nections: “In high school, I fell in love with
Dave Matthews Band. Suddenly, all my dad’s
singer-songwriter music started to make
sense. I could kinda hear how Dave Matthews
was a derivative of singer-songwriters before
him.”
He got his rst guitar when he entered
college, which he fell in love with because
of its mobility. But there’s not really any in-
strument Mraz is reluctant to attempt, from
upright bass to drums to ddle to harmoni-
um. “I play everything badly. I don’t mind; I’m
not afraid,” he says. “I’ve built my whole career
around accidents. You bang on an instrument,
discover a sound. en, okay, I’ll build a whole
song around that sound or that chord pro-
gression. A er you do that a thousand times,
you’ll eventually get a couple of them that
are really great.”
at willingness to play and the brav-
ery to keep inventing (along with plenty
of hard work, of course) have gi ed Mraz
with a career as wide-ranging as it is
illustrious. He spoke to
Ravinia
Magazine
by phone in early July from Okemah,
OK, where he performed at the annual
Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. And as the
year began, he was extending his debut
appearance on Broadway, playing the
leading man in Sara Bareilles’s musi-
cal
Waitress
. In prior years, he found
himself playing some of the world’s
most prestigious venues, including an
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