On the road with Maroon 5

Funny thing about the music business: For all the mind-warping pressure to succeed right out of the gate, should a debut or particular record wow critics and consumers, there are exponentially higher expectations for its follow-up.

 

Plenty of performers, from Fall Out Boy to Miranda Lambert, have unveiled hotly anticipated albums in 2007, and few discs were as crucial to continued stardom as Maroon 5's It Won't Be Soon Before Long. The Los Angeles quintet was a slow-burn success, releasing its debut Songs About Jane in 2002 and watching as lead single This Love gradually took hold of radio playlists.

 

Fast forward a few months and the quintet is taking home a couple of Grammy awards (for Best New Artist and Best Pop Performance), playing sold-out shows in arenas around the globe topped off by some gobsmacking sales figures: More than 29 million copies moved worldwide. You try calmly approaching your sophomore record.

 

But that's exactly what Adam Levine and his bandmates did, taking a breath and delivering an assured, stylish second album that has further heightened the band's profile.

 

'Yeah, it's nice,' says Levine by phone from a Charlottesville, Va., tour stop. 'We're playing shows every night in front of really welcoming crowds who've missed us and we missed them -- it's a good feeling in the air.'

 

A tireless road warrior who spent many months promoting Songs About Jane, Levine says the band's current tour (an environmentally minded affair that's offsetting its carbon emissions with the help of British-based climate change organization Global Cool) is 'more thought through' than its previous jaunts.

 

'Everything was such a whirl the first time,' says Levine. 'We found ourselves suddenly playing arenas.'

 

It Won't Be Soon Before Long will keep the fellas entertaining large rooms for the foreseeable future, with its combination of R&B grit, glossy melodies and sharp pop hooks. More muscular and ambitious than Jane, Long is teeming with current and soon-to-be hits: Makes Me Wonder and Wake Up Call have already made sizable dents in the charts, with Little of Your Time, Back at Your Door and Won't Go Home Without You waiting in the wings.

 

'I want to grab people's attention, in general, and I think that comes through in the songwriting,' says Levine. 'I want to do exciting things -- we don't want to do generic things that everyone else does. While we do play pop music, we think our particular brand of pop music is unlike a lot of other current pop music. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how I see it.'

 

Throughout the conversation, the 28-year-old, fittingly, drifts between the singular and the plural -- as the band's lead vocalist, guitarist and primary songwriter, Levine tends to be pushed to the fore of most any conversation about Maroon 5. But while appearing front and center on a Rolling Stone cover might imply that he is quietly, slowly pulling away from his four bandmates, Levine patiently dismisses the idea of striking out on his own, stranding the group high and dry.

 

'We had this conversation a long time ago,' says Levine. 'There needs to be a strong frontman -- that's my job. Trust me, people do not mind having the spotlight taken off them in this band and I really like the spotlight. ... As long as I'm pretty, I'll use it to sell records.'

 

Of course, he follows that thought with a caveat.

 

'I've learned it's foolish to make too many plans. You don't know how it's gonna go, you don't know what the trajectory of a career's gonna be -- you have to embrace whatever happens and deal with it accordingly.'