(previous page)

Photo: Schiko

Hawthorne's new-old soul songs are so timelessly good it's almost ridiculous. Where does it all come from, Mayer?

"I was mainly a hip-hop head," he says. "I'm still listening to hip-hop every day and very influenced by it, and that's what I grew up on. You know, I wasn't around in the '60s when a lot of this incredible soul music was comin' out of Detroit. I grew up in the hip-hop generation in the '80s and '90s, so you definitely hear a lot of that influence in my album."

That influence is not real blatant in Arrangement's honeyed soul tracks; Hawthorne's hip-hop DNA runs like a basic scheme through each of the album's recombinant "greatest hits of soul" mélanges. What he's doing is mix 'n' matching all of his favorite parts –– playing samples, in essence –– of the best soul songs we ever heard and pumping them out again in new configurations. The Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Martha & the Vandellas, pre-Ernie-guitar-jams Isley Brothers, James Brown, Otis Redding, Al Green, O'Jays, Spinners, Stylistics, Delfonics, Chi-Lites, Archie Bell & the Drells, they all get their nods in Hawthorne's mix. This particular pastiching is not at all cold and calculated, by the way, and it's a methodology not too far removed from what Jeff Lynne did with the Beatles' catalog on all those now seemingly unique ELO hits of the '70s.

At any rate, "Just Ain't Gonna Work Out" is like the long-lost link between Smoky Robinson and maybe Madlib, Hawthorne's silken falsetto and choral harmonies wrapped around a chunky cut-n-thrust breakbeat. The title track tips a hat to Earth, Wind & Fire, where acoustic piano and horn lines caress a lovely fluttering vocal and '70s jazzy pop chords designed to elevate and modulate in surprising ways –– where the heartbreak is assuaged in a bittersweet-delicious "that's just the way things are" (puckish twinkles added for that sweet-sighing effect...).

And what is a "drell," after all? "Your Easy Lovin' Ain't Pleasin' Nothin'" has the bum-bum-bum-da-dump-dump-da-da beat you know from a million Motownish hits, starting with "It Don't Come Easy" by the Supremes. "I Wish It Would Rain" is not the Temps' original but so close musically and lyrically that it's like a very artistic inversion of it, as if to pay tribute and say, "You like this? Well, check out the source."

All this is juiced up considerably by the man's production skills. It will freak you out how, on "Make Her Mine," he gets down exactly, and I mean exactly, the Motown tandem bass & drums sound. "The Ills" is a poppy-peppy horn, drums and bongos-led hybrid of Curtis Mayfield and a party scene from Starsky and Hutch. Maybe best of all is to immerse in the languid lounge piano and close-miked drums (so '70s-studio) of "Shiny & New," where it's "You make me feel brand-new" all over again, now and for all time...

It's sincerity that has produced the greatest music of any kind, down through history, from Bach to rock and back again. In Mayer Hawthorne's case, the finely detailed realness of his sound owes ultimately to the love and respect he has for the musicians upon whose template he's creating his own new personal thing. Of course, a lot of people will refer, entirely moot-pointedly, to this new Hawthorne thing as "retro."

"It was not my intention to make some kind of throwback imitation soul record," he says. "I really wanted to make sure that I put my own stamp on it, and I moved the music forward, and that I'm bringing it to a new generation of kids who didn't grow up on that music, or missed out on it."

And not to get overly solemn about all that love and respect bizness, either –– Hawthorne's serious about having a good time with this thing.

"I have a tremendous amount of respect for the music," he says, "and the music is extremely sincere. But it's the fun factor that's missing from a lot of music these days. Everybody wants to have fun, and I've been trying to keep it as fun as possible while being true to the music."