Mayer Hawthorne – Daytrotter Session 12-07-11 (2011)

The Detroit, Michigan-dwelling, Motown-loving soul singer – who recently performed an alternative to the Detroit Lions’ Thanksgiving Day halftime performance by Nickelback from his parents’ home, broadcast on Rolling Stone’s website – is everything that the Motor City’s musical legacy was built on when Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson were running the town. He’s unabashedly retro-leaning and it makes every song sound as if it were a classic – something plucked out of a hit parade, dusted off and performed again, anew, with the horns bleating the sweet punctuations and the harmonies pitched thick and about as perfect as you can ever get them. He writes the catchiest damn hooks and provides us with the kinds of loving and leaving, pining for women types of songs that still get done today, but often in much different ways and with much different results.