Buzzin Music

Mayer Hawthorne – A Strange Arrangement – album review

(Stones Throw)

Mayer Hawthorne - A Strange Arrangement

Mayer Hawthorne grew up in Michigan, near Detroit, a city he describes as rich in music tradition and high on the list of influences in his choice of a musical career.

A Strange Arrangement is his debut album released last year without ever really making the commercial splash it should have.  Certainly it is only recently that I was turned on to him after a quick look on YouTube at the video for the fantastic single from A Strange Arrangement, ‘Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out’, a piece of jazzy soul, to which Mayer Hawthorne adds a spoken introduction something in the vein of The Chi-Lites, and to the rest, a falsetto to rival Cry Me A River in its ability to tangle the heart strings with ambiguous gender imitation.

In fact, a lot of Mayer Hawthorne sounds like The Chi-Lites, and with such a consciously retro sound, it almost sounds like a pastiche, but, as is often the case with these things, it is clearly an indisputable love of the music that is being mimicked and that is driving these songs, and it is therefore really quite hard to tell the line between irony and reality.

At other times, you find Mayer Hawthorne using other genres – r&b, Motown, pop – in the way you always imagined them ideally, but had never quite heard. He does it with such simplicity, honesty and an ear for a well-produced song that it is near impossible not to love what he is doing in a manner much deeply than irony alone would allow.

These, then, are absolutely brilliant contemporary tunes that would be compared with the Winehouses of the world if his subjects didn’t require singing plainly and truthfully about the sort of candidly simple subjects soul singers used to sing about – beautiful girls, pathetically fallacious rain, or plain simple positive thinking.

Out on the label, Stones Throw, A Strange Arrangement joins an output of some great contemporary soul. Apparently, label chief Peanut Butter Wolf needed just a cursory listen to two songs to realise he had to sign Mayer Hawthorne up.

Here’s the video for ‘Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out’. See what I mean about the ambiguity between irony and passion for the music?

Here is the MySpace link for Mayer Hawthorne.