Question: What's been the best part of your amazing year?
Answer: For me, it's that I've become a world traveler. Before I even got into music, I would have to save my money to travel, and traveling is what would always inspire me. I'd come home with a new story. ... And now, I have the best of both worlds, because I'm making music all the time, and every day, I'm in a different city, and that to me is the most beautiful part, the fact that I get to travel the world, and do stuff that normal kids my age don't get to do at my age. It's given me a voice that I didn't even know I had.
Q: What's the hardest part?
A: I think the biggest surprise was that I wasn't aware that this was a job. When you're a kid you have these dreams - you wanna be a rock star, you want that lifestyle. And then you get here and it's kind of heartbreaking some days. It's embarrassing some days.
Q: What's heartbreaking about it?
A: There's a lot of shameless self-promotion that goes along with it to get to this level, to get to these theaters. Sure, there's other routes you can take, but the route we took involves 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.' We visit radio stations.
To me it just seems very unnatural and not as artistic. You make the art, but then you spend so much time being the salesman for it.
And I've gotten to the point where I'll only do as much as I can afford to do.
Q: How is the self-promotion any different from your days singing in the subway?
A: When you're playing on the street, you have eight seconds to entertain someone, because they're walking, and in New York, they're not going to stop walking. Especially at the level I was at that time. I don't think I was even using my natural voice when I sang - I sang a lot like that Creed guy back then. But I would challenge myself in those eight seconds to make up something . .. about the person walking by, and you begin to understand characters.
Q: When you're singing your heart out and someone plunks down a dime, do you get angry?
A: No, no, no! I think anyone who's on the street playing music, I don't think they're there just to make the money. They're there because they love to play the music and they have created their own venue. I would hope that someone who's in the arts has made a little mission statement that they agree to be poor their entire life. I made that. Because it's a hard sell, music, whether you play it on the street or in a theater. Because it's free.
Q: What songs do you get most excited to sing?
A: I wanted to explore some old favorites that I think people are going to want to hear, the more popular ones from last year, but I want to perform them the way they were born, they were originally written, and give the audience a new perspective on it.
But what I'm most excited to perform is new material. Stuff that I've been creating and haven't had a chance to perform. They are what they are in my apartment, but I really want to reveal them under lights to a roomful of new ears.
Q: What song do you wince at singing?
A: Every now and then I would get like that with the 'Remedy,' but I do my best to mix it up. Like I came up with a new arrangement for this tour ... a new kind of swinging version for it as well.
AP: Have you ever had a performance you'd rather forget?
Mraz: There was one night in Denver, I decided I was going to open my songs on the piano ... and I walk out there and the piano was up on a riser. And I went to step out on the riser and I missed and I tripped and fell onto the riser.
Q: Do you miss those intimate shows of your coffeehouse performing days?
A: Absolutely. Ever since this started, I always thought, 'As soon as the tour is done, I'll go back to San Diego and I'll rock the coffee shop.' When I was in that coffee shop world, I had all the success in the world. Because I was playing regularly ... it just so happens I was in one spot. I knew the audience well. I look forward to the day I go back there. But a part of me says, 'Do this as long as you can. You'll create that Joe's Pub experience in every city you go to.'
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