Best of What's Next: Mayer Hawthorne

It’s hard to believe that Mayer Hawthorne’s debut A Strange Arrangement (out now)—with its the sunny neo-soul and doo-wop melodies so deftly recalling the sounds of Smokey Robinson and Holland-Dozier-Holland—was recorded in 2009. But it’s even harder to fathom that the album almost never came to be. For Mayer Hawthorne sole proprietor Andrew Mayer Cohen, the Motown-influenced tunes were just musical doodles, bedroom musings aimed at close friends and family; instead, the Ann Arbor, Mich., native was primarily concerned with DJing for his hip-hop crew the Athletic Mic League under the name Haircut. But after playing some of his demos for Stones Throw Records founder Peanut Butter Wolf (and convincing Wolf that that the tracks weren’t just re-cuts of older soul songs) he was offered a deal to record an entire album’s worth of material. Paste caught up with the unlikely soul-crooner while he was on tour earlier this fall to chat about defied expectations, chance encounters and being the crazy guy at the grocery store.

Paste: How’s the tour going? Have you been getting good reception?
Andrew Mayer Cohen: It’s been off the hook. Just way beyond anything we ever anticipated.

Paste: When did you start noticing that change?
Cohen: I would say it’s really only been a few months—you know, when all these crazy celebrities started endorsing it, like Justin Timberlake, Questlove, John Mayer and Alicia Keys, now.

Paste: Talk about when you saw all these celebrities endorsing you. What was your initial reaction?
Cohen: It’s hard to really wrap your head around it. It’s really just surreal. You know, I’ve never met any of these celebrities aside from Questlove from The Roots, and to see a guy like John Mayer—who has over two million followers on Twitter—calling my album the record of the year, it’s hard to even, like, fathom that. Going from being an independent artist who had never planned on recording an album to this in less than a year—it’s insane.

Paste: Take me back a year ago. Did you expect to see yourself where you are now?
Cohen: I was working hard to make it in the music business, but I was focused on hip-hop. I was a hip-hop DJ and producer and I never had any plans to even record an album of soul music. And then when I met Peanut Butter Wolf and he heard a couple of the demo songs that I had done just for fun—for like an experiment of the side. He was totally blown away and he asked me to record a full album’s worth of material for Stones Throw. You know, it’s just such an incredible opportunity that I couldn’t turn it down, even though that wasn’t really what I wanted to do at the time. That was just November ²⁰⁰⁸—it hasn’t even been a year yet. We released that first single on a red heart-shaped record and at the time we pressed 1,000 copies of it and nobody had heard of Mayer Hawthorne at that point, except for my family and close friends, and we didn’t know if we’d even be able to sell 1,000 records, and those first 1,000 copies sold out in three days. I think everybody—myself, Peanut Butter Wolf, everybody at Stones Throw, my management company and everybody—was just like, “Holy shit, what the hell happened here?” And that’s kinda how it’s been for the rest of this past year. Everyday it seems like it’s something crazier that looks like it keeps getting bigger and bigger. I’m on an indie label on a very small budget and we don’t have a lot of money for marketing and promotion of the album and it’s really been mostly word of mouth. It’s been incredible how much attention this project has gotten.

Paste: How did you get involved with Peanut Butter Wolf?
Cohen: I met Peanut Butter Wolf at a party in L.A. called The Do-Over. I was introduced to him by a mutual friend who had heard my Mayer Hawthorne demo songs—she was a close friend of mine so I played it for her. She’s a singer too, Noelle Scaggs of The Rebirth, and she was the one who introduced me to Peanut Butter Wolf. At the time, I was finishing up a new album with Now On, my hip-hop electro-soul crew, and that was really what I was focused on, being a hip-hop DJ and producer. And Noelle, when she introduced me to Peanut Butter Wolf, she didn’t say anything about any of that. She said, “Wolf, you gotta hear these Mayer Hawthorne songs.” Which was something that I wasn’t even taking very seriously then, and definitely wasn’t what I was pushing. I never planned on those songs ever even being released or heard by the public. But Wolf sounded interested and I had sent him the tracks and he wrote me back about a month later. He said, “Hey, these tracks are great, what is this?” ’Cause he didn’t even understand what it was. You know, I had told him they were my songs, but he didn’t really get it that I had actually written, played, sang and recorded it all myself.

Paste: Didn’t you record the album on a four-track?
Cohen: I recorded everything in my bedroom at home, almost, for this album. It’s all very lo-fi, low budget and I just had to work with what I got. It took a lot of convincing for Peanut Butter Wolf to believe that those tracks were really mine, and then once he was convinced he just flipped out. He asked me if I would record a whole album for Stones Throw, but prior to that it was something that I had never even thought about doing.

Paste: Talk about your the songwriting process. Was it a tough task to write a whole album’s worth of material?
Cohen: I never have been able to sit down and try to write a song—it doesn’t ever really work for me like that. At first when Wolf asked me to record a whole album it was sort of daunting. I had never even thought about that and I only had ever recorded two songs and I didn’t know if I would even be able to do it. But as I got going, luckily the songs kept coming and it ended up being a lot easier than I thought. Usually the songs just kind of come at the most inopportune moment, when I’m right in the middle of something else. I’ll have to drop everything I’m doing and call my voicemail, leave a message for myself and sing the song so I won’t forget it.

Paste: What’s been the most awkward time to stop what you’re doing to call yourself?
Cohen: I was at Albertsons grocery shopping one time and had to park my cart somewhere and go outside and sing the song to myself in the parking lot, and I remember a bunch of people in the parking lot kinda staring at me like I was crazy. But you have to do it—otherwise, I’ll forget it.

Paste: I’s sort of hard to write down your ideas especially with this type of music because it’s so melody driven, I’d imagine.
Cohen: Yeah, I mean I’m not formally trained at anything that I play. I’ve never sang in the choir or anything like that. I just do everything by ear and I just listen to it and figure it out. I don’t know how to write music, like sheet music, or read that, so I gotta do everything just however I can.

Paste: When did you start playing music?
Cohen: I’ve been playing in bands since high school. My dad taught me how to play bass guitar when I was, like, six years old. I always wanted to play drums but they wouldn’t let me have a drum set in the house ’cause it was too loud, so I would go over to a friend’s house and play drums. I was in rock bands, funk bands and punk bands in high school and then I got really into hip hop and learned how to DJ and had this crew called the Athletic Mic League and that was when I really found my own path in music. I got really into hip-hop and I still love hip-hop and that’s my background. This is my first crack at soul music. I was very fortunate to grow up in a musical family, though. My dad still plays in bands today.

Paste: What’s the next move for Mayer Hawthorne?
Cohen: My debut album came out so I’m pretty focused on that and we’ll be touring the whole U.S. and doing a 30-plus-day European tour, as well, right after this and that will take us clear to the end of the year. And we just confirmed New Year’s Eve with John Mayer in Vegas, so that’s going to be really crazy. So I’m basically just touring right now and supporting my debut album. But I’ve already got songs written for the next Mayer Hawthorne album and I’m also working on a New Wave album with producer 14KT—we’re still in the beginning stages right now. I’m always working on new music.