Is Mayer Hawthorne the Rick Astley of soul?
His answer: “When people are surprised at the way that I look ... hopefully people have an open mind and are focusing more on the music and not the way that I look or the color of my skin.”
Follow Mayer on Twitter: twitter.com/mayerhawthorne
It’s annoying when hugely successful artists claim that they didn’t really want all that fame. It was an accident, they claim, with a shrug and an incredulous smile. But in the case of throw-back soul singer Mayer Hawthorne, we kind of believe him.
“This singing soul music, it never occurred to me that it might be a path for me,” says the Ann Arbor, Mich. native, who was DJing and performing with a hip-hop group before his success with the recently released LP, “A Strange Arrangement.” “You have to keep in mind that I had never planned on having this released or heard by the public. The songs were really just for myself and family and close friends.”
From Hawthorne’s high falsetto to his deep Barry White-esque lover man monologues mid-song — things like, “I gotta tell it like it is, I don’t want to make this any harder than it has to be, so don’t cry” — this indie punk recreates ’70s soul with obsessive authenticity. We wondered if any of it bordered on parody, which Hawthorne firmly denies.
“Just from immersing myself in that music for the past 15 years or whatever, certain things just start to sound normal and natural,” he says of his crooning.
Mayer Hawthorne
Oct. 1, 8 p.m.
The Knitting Factory
361 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn
$12, 347-529-6696
www.knittingfactory.com