Maroon 5‘s new album, Love is Like — their first since 2021’s Jordi — is out on Friday. While “Love is Like” is actually the name of a song on the album, guitarist James Valentine thinks the title makes sense for the project as a whole.
“I think it’s apropos for a Maroon 5 album because … that’s the subject matter that we usually mine for lyrics … the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations of love.”
In recent years, singer Adam Levine has written Maroon 5’s songs with outside writers. But for this project, they returned to a more collaborative way of doing things, with the band members writing a bunch of songs together.
“I’d say like half of the record is more of the organic Maroon 5 sort of classic sound, if you want to call it that,” James says. “And then another half of it sounds to me like a lot of the sample-based hip-hop of the early 2000s.”
He notes, “Which is also kind of back to where Maroon 5 started, in that we were listening to a lot of that music, and that influencing the stuff that we were making in the early 2000s.”
Since they hadn’t collaborated in so many years, James shares that writing for the new album was an “interesting” experience, because they’ve all changed so much.
“I think everyone is so much nicer and more diplomatic with the way we deal with each other,” he laughs. “When we were kids, we were pretty hot-headed and every decision about every chord or every drum fill was a knock-down, drag-out fight. And so it was nice to be back in the studio and sort of … just be a little nicer to each other.”
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