Adam Levine has been giving Maroon 5 his full attention for the past few years, after moonlighting as a singer during his eight years coaching on The Voice. That has culminated in a new song out today: “Beautiful Mistakes,†featuring none other than Megan Thee Stallion. The song is from a new Maroon 5 album that’s “not far off,†as Levine told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. The only other notable thing about this song is that Megan hopefully got a fat check out of the whole thing, but Levine’s Apple Music interview? That’s a different story. “I feel like there aren’t any bands anymore, you know?†Levine told Zane Lowe at one point, reminiscing about the early days of Maroon 5 in the 2000s. “That’s the thing that makes me kind of sad, is that there were just bands,†Levine went on. “There’s no bands anymore, and I feel like they’re a dying breed.†What about Haim? you may be wondering. Or the Chicks? Did this man miss the whole last Foo Fighters press cycle? “I mean, there still are plenty of bands,†Levine conceded. “And maybe they’re not in the limelight quite as much, or in the pop limelight, but I wish there could be more of those around.â€
Speaking of bands, how about Blink-182? Levine thinks Maroon 5’s new song sounds like old Blink-182, he told Lowe — and that’s not all. “What a lot of people don’t realize about Blink 182 specifically, because they are who we were talking about, they wrote great songs,†he said. “Those were great songs.†Like some of us haven’t been saying this for years.
Here’s one more Adam Levine Music Take for the road: Radio is good! “The radio’s a really valuable, cool thing to have,†he told Lowe. “I’ll never not romanticize the idea of having our songs played on the radio. And I think that’s a beautiful thing, so I wanted to keep chasing that.†But you know what’s even better than radio? Concerts! Levine added that he “kind of started to say to myself, well, we’ll make records for the radio, but we’ll perform rock shows for our fans.†“And that’s a nice thing,†he continued, “because you don’t want to go and see a band live and have them sound exactly like the record, especially if it’s a little bit more of a pop-leaning thing, with more programming and more looping, and things like that.†Someone get this man before he goes full Dave Grohl.