No matter how many times you’ve sung a song, sometimes you have a mental blip and forget the words. This was the case during Maroon 5‘s show at Milwaukee’s American Family Insurance Amphitheater on Friday, when frontman Adam Levine was singing their first big hit, “She Will Be Loved.” Levine accidentally opened with the second verse of the song, and when he continued singing, he forgot the lyrics again. The crowd gamely played along, singing the real lyrics loudly. Levine ended up stopping the show and acknowledging his screw-up. “I f—– up,” he admitted.
Still, Levine was in good spirits and acknowledged that their debut album, Songs About Jane, was quickly approaching a major milestone. “This next year will be the 20th anniversary of our first album,” Levine continued. “And I have not one time f—– that up. And it’s funny because I didn’t even need to admit it, ’cause you guys came with me on the journey.”
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Like many other musical acts, Maroon 5 cancelled their 2020 tour due to the coronavirus pandemic, but the band is back on the road for their nine-week summer tour beginning on August 10 and running through October 8. This tour is especially notable due to their nearly 20 years as a band, an increasingly rare occurrence. In a March interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Levine bemoaned the lack of bands in pop music these days. “I feel like there aren’t any bands anymore, you know?” Levine said. “That’s the thing that makes me kind of sad, is that there were just bands. There’s no bands anymore, and I feel like they’re a dying breed.” Well, mostly. “I mean, there still are plenty of bands,” the former The Voice coach admitted. “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.”
In the interview, Levine admitted that he still gets a thrill about radio play. “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.” Levine continued, adding 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, 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.”
