Maroon 5 Album Recommendations: "Songs About Jane"

Album Recommendations: Songs About Jane

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Maroon 5

[#] Songs About Jane (2002)

Quintessential 2000s on-again off-again love rock.

Reviewed May 2, 2025

A few years following the failure of Kara's Flowers, Maroon 5 sprung back to life to slightly delayed, zingy pop success. What was the secret sauce? Drama. Songs About Jane is bathed in the tales of love and woe that The Fourth World was pretty free of. It works! Maroon 5 get by by splitting the difference, enough bite in the spiky rhythms and guitars to play to a pop-friendly rock crowd, and enough prettiness in Adam Levine's croon and cruelty in his words to propel this thing to 5x platinum in the US alone. I like it a bunch, but a bit of overproduction here (the fake "live" "Not Coming Home", really?), a bit of repeating yourself there—it's not perfect. In truth, I do rather miss the boyish overspill of ideas these guys had as Kara.

As a rock listener, you'd imagine the grittier tracks would work best on me, and you'd be right. "This Love" slimes along with its dramatic pianos and icy guitar stabs, and opener "Harder to Breathe" matches Adam's wordy aggression with a huge, killer humbucker tone. A lot of the ballads aren't bad either—"She Will Be Loved" is a rainy scene in a romance film, and the edginess of "Secret"'s lyrics with the song's minor-key hesitancy and buildup suits it well. Jane's downfall is the occasional moments of, erm, familiarity in the back half; if we can dunk on Nickelback for writing the same song over and over, how about Maroon 5 doing it within a three-song space between "The Sun" and "Sunday Morning"? And anyone else hear the uncanny Jay Kay impersonation on "Sweetest Goodbye"?