Year: 2004
Jason Mraz didn’t learn guitar until he was 18! Kinda like me! Except that I started at 17. His debut album, Waiting For My Rocket to Come hit double platinum, and his current album, Mr. A-Z (haha, very nice wordplay (Note: “Wordplay” is also his first single from the album)), is also doing quite well. I tried to get tickets to his concert last year at the U, but the tickets sold out way too fast. His songs are amazing in the way that they have lyrics comparable to great folk songs and a beat and pronunciation comparable to great rappers. And while his lyrics often fill many pages, they always make sense, or contain tons of puns and jokes in there.
Almost every Jason Mraz song could be a song of the week, but in the light of his new album, I chose this for one reason. Notice in the lyrics that the word “words” is repeated many many times. Now if you took Wally’s English class through Hamlet, or if you saw Branaugh’s Hamlet, you know that Hamlet says “words, words, WORDS!” to Polonius while feigning insanity. Right after that class (or during it, rather), I wondered whether Mraz knew of this Hamlet line when he wrote the song. I just don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the 4th paragraph/stanza, the word “words” is used three times, just like in Hamlet, and the song ends with
And I just can’t resist including this song, too, as a kind of bonus, since the title reminds me of me playing frisbee on the heliconia team. So, I present, “Geek in the Pink” from his album “Mr. A-Z.”