Rob Hoerburger (for the NYTimes) on Mayer Hawthorne and “nerdy” soul men.
And it all started on a lark. At the end of 2008, after some attempts at a hip-hop career, he wrote and recorded a couple of soul tracks, with the intention of sampling them for a hip-hop project. “I really love rap music,” he said. “I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s with Public Enemy, N.W.A., LL Cool J. I’m a hip-hop encyclopedia. But I got kind of frustrated with the chauvinistic side of rap music, the one that makes it hard to write songs about love and relationships. I think all those songs were just building up over time, and I couldn’t get ’em out making hip-hop music.”
After Hawthorne recorded those two tracks, his record company’s president sent over a contract for an entire album — an entire soul album. Hawthorne said he thought it must have been a mistake. Not because he was a white middle-class Jewish guy — Hawthorne’s real name is Andrew Mayer Cohen, Drew to his friends — and felt he didn’t know the music, but because he knew the music too well. He grew up outside Detroit and was spoon-fed Motown by a musician father who went to a mostly black high school in the ’60s. Suddenly Hawthorne was being asked to build on hallowed ground where family monuments — Robinson, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye — stood. “It was never in my game plan to record an album of soul music,” he said. “I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I didn’t even know what Mayer Hawthorne was. It was just a funny name I made up, a porn-star name. There was no such thing as Mayer Hawthorne.”
Peanut Butter Wolf (real name: Chris Manak), the boyish 41-year-old president of Hawthorne’s label, Stones Throw, told me that some of Hawthorne’s initial vocals were recorded slow, “like Barry White,” almost as if he were treating them as a novelty. “That way,” Wolf said, “if people didn’t like it, he could say it was a joke.” Then Hawthorne started taking the project more seriously, and when the album came out, “the reaction was such a nice surprise,” Wolf said. “It was a breath of fresh air.” After the release, Hawthorne tracked the songs that garnered the most downloads and was surprised to find that one of the most popular was a fairly standard love song called “Make Her Mine.” “No one could really give me a good answer why,” he said. “Finally I asked a female friend, and she said: ‘I know exactly why: the words are so sweet. Every girl wants somebody to write a song about them like that.’ ”
