JASON'S JOINT

Story by Shirley Halperin
Photos by Brian Jahn

If there’s one major perk to having a platinum-selling album, it’s finally being able to splurge on some of the things you’ve always wanted. Like the palatial 3,600-square-foot home outside of San Diego where singer-songwriter Jason Mraz now sits, loading up his glass bong. Nestled in a development-free spider-infested avocado grove, the Spanish-styled mini-mansion (which includes a guest house that’s soon to become a recording studio) boasts four bedrooms, 360-degree views, three fireplaces, a hot tub for eight and a tiki-lounge-like bar area adjacent to the pool. Talk about the ultimate stoner pad!

Turns out Mraz—whose 2002 debut, Waiting for My Rocket to Come, yielded the Top 40 hits “The Remedy (I Won’t Worry)” and “You and I Both”—had exactly that in mind when he bought the five-acre property a year ago and invited his bandmates, merch guy and art director to move in. His inspiration? Bob Marley.

“I visited the Marley house in Jamaica,” Mraz explains. “And on the tour, they tell you that Bob and all the Wailers lived there—they all slept together, they all cooked together....It was a way for them to stay unified and be creative constantly. I like the idea of having a safe haven for exploration. [At my house,] there’s always someone practicing an instrument or painting or just chilling, being high. It’s a really happy place.”

But most important to Mraz is having a place where he can record on a whim. “Before, if I wanted to record a song, I had to pay to rent a studio. Now, I’ve got the musicians there to do it, and I can just go in my living room, hit ‘record’ and get it done.”

Mraz did just that for his long-awaited follow-up album, Mr. A-Z (Atlantic), devoting several disciplined months to constructing a CD’s worth of white-boy hip-hop (“Wordplay,” “The Geek in the Pink”), Casanova crooning (“Bella Luna”) and sensitive-guy melodic pop (“Life Is Wonderful,” “Mr. Curiosity”). But while he may have enjoyed the comfort of working from home (like tracking vocals off his deck), it also meant long days and nights with little escape. Enter legendary producer Steve Lillywhite, the man behind U2’s and the Dave Matthews Band’s biggest records.

“There were a couple of days where Steve could see I was getting exhausted,” Mraz recalls. “We were supposed to be experimenting, but he could tell I was running out of ideas, so he’d say, ‘Go smoke, come back in 15 minutes and let’s do this!’ Or, when we took weekends off, he would tell me on Friday night, ‘Take a big hit of LSD this weekend and come back on Monday with a fresh perspective.’ He was basically like my gonzo lawyer from Fear and Loathing.”