Rolling Stone has declared Mayer Hawthorne one of their break through artist of the year, and John Mayer had him open his tour, so why are we loving another white guy doing a black sound?
He’s damn good at it.
Back Story: After moving to L.A. with a hip-hop group, Hawthorne made two soul tracks in his apartment on a whim — playing nearly all of the instruments himself and recording the vocals through headphones (he didn’t own a good microphone). The songs had such a convincingly vintage feel, they fooled his record label. “They thought it was an old record I dug up,” recalls Hawthorne. “They were like, ‘What is this? Do you have permission to reissue it?’ ”
Sounds Like: Hawthorne’s self-produced tunes are an eerily accurate homage to the Motown hit machine: Think Funk Brothers-style grooves, luxuriant harmonies, Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting chops and sweetly naive vocals that recall Smokey Robinson and the Chi-Lites. “I always tell people, ‘It’s not a soul revival, it’s a good-songwriting revival,’ ” says the 30-year-old. “I try to write timeless material, so hopefully kids will be digging my albums 30 years from now like I’m digging Lamont Dozier right now.”
