“It's not a little bit different”, Mayer Hawthorne says of his forthcoming album, Where Does This Door Go. “It's a lot different”. For his latest effort, the neo-soul singer tells Rolling Stone he threw out all of his previously self-imposed rules. The result is a radical left turn from the classic Holland-Dozier-Holland-style sound that comprised his first two efforts. “This is the album I always should have made”, he adds. “I truly did not give a fuck on this album. It was very freeing for me”.
Working with a dream team of producers for Where Does This Door Go, including Pharrell Williams (“He really got me to focus on the storytelling aspect”), helped Hawthorne refine his focus. “This time it was like a completely different experience working with all these other producers”, he says. “It took a lot of the work out of my hands when I'm not doing everything myself. It helped to just focus on being creative and writing”.
The album has a very California vibe to it, he says. Specifically, the singer points to “Crime”, a smooth, G-Funk-style ode to having parties broken up by cops, as stylistically West Coast. “It's really sort of my ‘Fuck Tha Police’”, he offers. “It's a very smooth song but it has a very underlying sort of N.W.A. vibe to it, as far as the content”. To flesh out his vision for the song, Hawthorne recruited Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar, who spits the first rap verse to ever appear on a Hawthorne cut. (Snoop Dogg guested on How Do You Do's “Can't Stop”, but Hawthorne insisted he sing for it.) “Kendrick was the only person that I wanted for that song”, he says of “Crime”. “It was just like, Kendrick being from LA and being from Compton and being a young, upcoming rapper, it just seemed like it would fit so perfectly. He brought that youthful angst and that sort of Tupac vibe. It really came out”.
Other highlights include the slinky, reggae-drenched “Allie Jones”, the Steely Dan-influenced “Backseat Lover", and “Her Favorite Song”, the Jessie Ware-assisted lead single anchored by a funky bass lick and a hip-hop beat.