Mayer Hawthorne

Reviews

hhv.de mag - Review

Good old Peanut Butter Wolf must have been rather puzzled when seeing Mayer Hawthorne for the very first time. He was convinced to be hearing oldschool-soul, some old recordings, of which the vocal force could simply not be deriving from a white man’s throat. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Mayer Hawthorne is a textbook example of a Blue Eyed soulman. With his roots in the Detroit soul, Marvin Gaye and the Supremes, he soon successfully took some HipHop-excursions and is now presenting his major debut – an exceptional bridge between a reminiscence of good, old Motown-classics and their contemporary editing. Through little outlets, such as Can’t Stop, on which he gets Snoop Dogg’s vocal (!) support, or Dreaming, a tribute to the Beach Boys and Hall&Oates, How Do You Do increases its flow and allows us escape from every day’s misery. Hawthorne seems a little more laid back than on his debut, which makes the soul even more authentic. Generally, with every second going by, it seems as if Hawthorne has internalized the soul. And despite every track having an immense mass appeal, what stands behind them appears to be honest and unaffected. This is probably where the ancestors of soul would have taken their hats off to Hawthorne.