DEFINITION OF COOL: MAYER HAWTHORNE
I’ve been looping his thirteen tracked, pimpsauced, so boss debut album ‘A Strange Arrangement’ for over a year now and I’ve been snagging up Mayer’s table scraps, 2010’s bootlegged ‘No Strings’ and yesterday’s ‘Mr. Blue Sky’, ever since. While he’s been hustling these vintage sounds for a minute, it’s not the springboard of his “geek is the new cool” flyness. When I throwback to when I first upped the volume on ‘Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out’ I found a video of him called “Dusty Fingers” about him diggin for 45’s. Mayne that video - W. Allen once wrote “That’s how you get better, playing with a stronger player.” If you could only spin some Stax, Chess, and Mowtown records with this cat and talk about Otis, Rufus Thomas, The Moonglows, mix in some David Ruffin, the Surpremes, Smokey Robinson… I’ll tell you, sitting with an hombre like Mayer Hawthorne and talking soul music, not only would you learn how to appreciate music more, you’d walk away a better bloke. Dude is the freakin coolest cat on the planet. No joke.
