The story of Maroon 5

Kara's Flowers at Brentwood

Long before Maroon 5, there was a garage band at Brentwood School, a private school on the west side of Los Angeles. Adam Levine, born on the eighteenth of March 1979, had been playing guitar since he was about ten, and music had taken over his life. At Brentwood he found friends who felt the same way, guitarist Jesse Carmichael and bassist Mickey Madden. A mutual friend introduced Adam to an older student, drummer Ryan Dusick, when Adam was fifteen and Ryan was sixteen. In February 1994 the four of them formed a band. They named it Kara's Flowers, after a girl at their school on whom, as they put it, the whole band had a collective crush.[1] [2] [3]

Adam's first professional show had come even earlier, at the Troubadour in West Hollywood when he was about twelve. He was so nervous that he played the whole set with his back to the audience. With Kara's Flowers he got braver. The band put out a homemade album called We Like Digging in late 1994, and in 1995 they played their first gig at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. Then came the lucky break. At a beach party in Malibu, an independent producer named Tommy Allen heard them. He offered to manage the boys and record an album with his partner, the songwriter John DeNicola, who had worked on the soundtrack of Dirty Dancing.[1] [2] [3]

That record found its way to Rob Cavallo, the producer who had just made Green Day famous, and Cavallo brought the band to Reprise Records. They re-recorded the album with him, and The Fourth World came out on the nineteenth of August 1997, while Adam and Mickey were still in their senior year of high school. The sound was bright, harmony heavy power pop. The band even landed a guest spot on the television drama Beverly Hills, 90210. Adam later joked that at that point they thought they were rock gods, and in their own minds they were the Beatles.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The world did not agree. The lead single, Soap Disco, went nowhere, and the album sold only around five thousand copies. Some critics predicted a hit, but the lyrics were widely mocked, and the band themselves later compared them to an episode of Sesame Street. Reprise let them go. Adam called the failure a huge disappointment that nearly ended the band, and looking back he blamed the rush of it all, a record made quickly with no touring base behind it. By the age of twenty, he said, they felt like tainted kids in a band nobody wanted to sign. When the album was reissued in 2004, the band added a note warning listeners to expect something completely different.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

New York, a new sound and a new name

After the flop, the members scattered to college. Ryan and Mickey stayed in Los Angeles and studied at UCLA. Adam and Jesse went east to Five Towns College in Dix Hills on Long Island. They lasted only about a semester, but those months changed everything. In New York, Adam was surrounded by hip hop, R and B, gospel and soul in a way he had never been in Los Angeles. Hearing Aaliyah's Are You That Somebody convinced him to chase a more soulful sound, and he began studying Stevie Wonder closely. Jesse, meanwhile, turned his attention back to the keyboards he had played since he was seven.[1] [2] [3]

Back in Los Angeles, the band tried country, folk and other styles before settling on groove based music. Adam also worked for a while as a writer's assistant on the television drama Judging Amy, whose producer Barbara Hall was a family friend, and spent his spare time writing songs about a painful breakup. In 2000 Kara's Flowers entered UCLA's Spring Sing competition and lost to a young singer named Sara Bareilles. In 2001 the producer Tim Sommer recorded three songs with them for MCA Records, but MCA passed and the tracks were never released. Several other labels turned down their demo too.[1] [2]

The door finally opened at Octone Records, a small New York label run by James Diener, Ben Berkman and David Boxenbaum. Berkman was handed a pile of demos, and the song that stopped him was Sunday Morning, which he called genius. He was amazed to see it credited to Kara's Flowers, the same band he had dismissed years earlier. After watching Adam at a showcase at the Viper Room, the Octone team was convinced. Berkman felt the band needed a fifth member on guitar, to free the singer so he could become the star Berkman saw in him. The label also insisted on a new name, to break with the band's teenage past.[1] [2] [3]

The new guitarist was James Valentine, a Nebraska native who had studied at Berklee College of Music and was playing in a Los Angeles band called Square. He had become friends with the Kara's Flowers boys, and he later said jamming with them felt like cheating on his own band, until he quit to join them for good. He and Adam bonded over a shared love of Phish. With Adam now free to front the band and Jesse moving mostly to keyboards, the group was briefly called just Maroon, and then Maroon 5. MusicBrainz dates the new band to May 2001. Where the name came from is still a closely guarded secret.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Songs About Jane, the slowest hit

Maroon 5 recorded their debut album at Rumbo Recorders in Los Angeles with producer Matt Wallace. Songs About Jane came out on the twenty fifth of June 2002. The Jane of the title was Adam's former girlfriend, Jane Herman. He said he first saw her at a gas station, fell for her, wrote her an awful song and played it in the shop where she worked. She became his muse for years, and he said nearly every song on the album had at least one line about her. The opening track, Harder to Breathe, came from a different frustration. When Octone told the band to keep writing, Adam wrote it in anger at the pressure.[1] [2]

At first almost nothing happened. The band simply toured and toured, opening for Michelle Branch, Matchbox Twenty and Sugar Ray, among many others. Then James Valentine reconnected with his old Berklee friend John Mayer, who loved the album, especially This Love, and invited Maroon 5 to open his 2003 tour. Harder to Breathe slowly climbed the radio charts, and This Love, released as a single in January 2004, turned into a smash. Its music video, directed by Sophie Muller, had to be trimmed to stay on MTV because of its intimate scenes with Adam's then girlfriend. By the end of 2004 the album was among the best sellers in America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Songs About Jane reached number six on the Billboard 200 in September 2004, twenty six months after its release. That was the longest wait for a first top ten appearance since modern sales tracking began in 1991. It topped the charts in Britain, Australia, France, New Zealand and Ireland, and eventually sold around ten million copies worldwide. She Will Be Loved, with a music video starring Kelly Preston, reached number five in America and number one in Australia. Its gentle sound pushed many alternative rock stations to drop the band, which from then on belonged mostly to pop radio.[1] [2] [3]

The awards followed. In February 2005 Maroon 5 won the Grammy for Best New Artist, nearly three years after their debut came out, and a year later a live version of This Love won them a second Grammy. They played Live 8 in Philadelphia in 2005, where Adam sang with Stevie Wonder. That same year George Lucas personally chose them to perform at his American Film Institute tribute, because they were his children's favourite band. Adam also appeared on Kanye West's single Heard 'Em Say, a song that grew out of a conversation on a plane the two of them shared.[1] [2] [3]

Losing a drummer, gaining a number one

The endless touring came at a price. Ryan Dusick, the drummer who had been there since the Brentwood garage days, had an old sports injury that the road made worse, with serious damage to his wrist and shoulder. He began missing shows, with fill in drummers taking his place, and in September 2006 he left the band. His replacement was Matt Flynn, who had played with Gavin DeGraw and the B-52's and had been drumming with Maroon 5 on tour since 2004. Ryan was not simply written out. On the next album he was credited as musical director. In 2022 he published a memoir called Harder to Breathe, about making Maroon 5, losing it all, and finding recovery, with a foreword by Adam.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The second album took eight months to record. Adam described It Won't Be Soon Before Long as sexier and stronger than the debut, less about one relationship and more electric, with nods to Prince, Michael Jackson, the Police and Talking Heads. The lead single, Makes Me Wonder, had been kicking around for about four years without a chorus that worked. The band finally found one during a writing trip to Las Vegas, and producer Mark Endert gave it a seventies funk feel. Adam said the song hid a second meaning, his frustration with American politics and the Iraq War, disguised as a love song so it would not sound preachy.[1] [2] [3]

When the album came out in May 2007, Makes Me Wonder jumped from number sixty four to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in a single week. At the time it was the biggest leap to the top in the chart's history, and it was the band's first American number one. The album debuted at number one with about four hundred and thirty thousand copies sold in its first week, and it broke the iTunes record for digital album sales. Makes Me Wonder went on to win the band their third Grammy. Adam, though, admits he misjudged one single. He was sure Won't Go Home Without You would be a worldwide number one, and it became one of their weakest performers.[1] [2] [3]

The band kept busy. They opened for the Police in Miami, headlined a North American arena tour, and in 2008 re-recorded If I Never See Your Face Again as a duet with Rihanna, which appeared on reissues of both the band's album and Rihanna's. They even played themselves on an episode of CSI: NY. Adam, meanwhile, was becoming a pop culture figure in his own right. In 2007 he sang in the Saturday Night Live digital short Iran So Far with Andy Samberg. Around this time he also told interviewers the band might be near its peak and that he was not sure he wanted to do this into his forties.[1] [2] [3]

A stumble in Switzerland, a rescue on television

For the third album, a legendary producer called them. Robert John Mutt Lange, the man behind AC/DC's Back in Black and Def Leppard's Hysteria, had heard they were writing and asked to produce. The band spent two months with him in 2009 at his studio near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Adam said Lange worked him harder than anyone ever had, often telling him a finished song was merely a good start and to strip it back to the drums. The cover photo was taken by a nineteen year old British photographer, Rosie Hardy, who shot it in her own bedroom and modelled for it herself.[1] [2] [3]

Hands All Over came out in September 2010 and debuted at number two, but it sold only about a hundred and forty two thousand copies in its first week, a third of what the previous album had managed. The lead single, Misery, peaked at number fourteen. Adam later called the record a hodgepodge of ideas that did not fit together, and joked that Switzerland's famous neutrality had infected the album. James Valentine admitted it had not sold at the pace of the earlier records. For the first time, Maroon 5 looked like a band that might be fading.[1] [2] [3]

Then came television. The band's manager, Adam's childhood friend Jordan Feldstein, approached NBC about a new singing contest called The Voice. Adam scoffed at first, because he disliked reality television, but a long meeting with the producer Mark Burnett changed his mind. He admitted the band was not doing as well as they wanted, and the gamble seemed worth it. The Voice premiered in April 2011 with Adam, Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green and Blake Shelton as coaches. It became a huge hit, Adam became its breakout star, and The Hollywood Reporter later estimated NBC was paying him ten to twelve million dollars a season.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The show launched the song that changed everything. The producers Shellback and Benny Blanco had a demo with a whistle hook and a chorus about dancing like Mick Jagger. Adam loved it, finished it, and brought in his fellow coach Christina Aguilera to sing a verse. They premiered Moves like Jagger on The Voice on the twenty first of June 2011, and in September it hit number one in America. It was the first time Maroon 5 had released a song written with outside professionals, and Adam said later it totally revived the band. Jagger himself called the idea very flattering, and let them use old footage of him in the video.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Overexposed and V

Moves like Jagger sold millions of downloads worldwide and was eventually certified diamond in America. In Britain it spent seven weeks at number two without ever reaching the top, tying an all time record, yet it still finished as the second best selling single of 2011. The band leaned into the new formula. In March 2012 Jesse Carmichael announced he was taking a break to study music and the healing arts. His place went to PJ Morton, a New Orleans singer and pastor's son who had been touring with the band since 2010 and became a full member. Old friend Sam Farrar also joined the touring lineup.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The fourth album, Overexposed, came out in June 2012 with the Swedish hitmaker Max Martin as executive producer, plus Ryan Tedder, Shellback and Benny Blanco. Its title was a wink at Adam's sudden ubiquity. Payphone, featuring Wiz Khalifa, sold about four hundred and ninety three thousand downloads in its first week in America, and gave the band their first number one in Britain. The next single, One More Night, spent nine straight weeks at number one on the Hot 100, keeping Psy's Gangnam Style off the top. Critics were split, and many felt the album focused too heavily on Adam.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Adam's fame kept growing. He acted in American Horror Story, took a starring role opposite Keira Knightley in the film Begin Again and refused to be paid for it, and in 2013 became the first singer ever named People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive. In May 2012 he began dating the Namibian model Behati Prinsloo, and they married in Mexico on the nineteenth of July 2014, with his childhood friend Jonah Hill officiating. Jesse Carmichael returned in 2014, making the band a six piece, and they moved to Interscope Records and Adam's own label, 222 Records. The fifth album, simply called V, debuted at number one.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

V brought three big hits. Maps reached number six, and in South Korea it topped several charts at once, a first for a foreign act. Sugar reached number two, with a video in which the band crashed real Los Angeles weddings. But Animals caused a storm. Its video showed Adam as a butcher stalking a woman played by his own wife, ending in blood soaked fantasy scenes. The sexual violence charity RAINN condemned it, saying stalking should never be confused with romance, and The Guardian's Jessica Valenti accused it of making violence against women look edgy. Adam dismissed the criticism, insisting he was simply playing a creep, like a character in a horror film.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Red Pill Blues, a death in the family and the Super Bowl

In 2016 Sam Farrar was made an official member, bringing the band to seven. Sam had been a friend and collaborator since the early days and played bass in Phantom Planet. His father, John Farrar, had been a member of the Shadows and wrote many of Olivia Newton-John's biggest hits. The sixth album, Red Pill Blues, named after the famous choice in The Matrix, arrived in November 2017. It was loaded with guests, including Kendrick Lamar, SZA, Future and Julia Michaels. Adam called it a cousin to Songs About Jane. What Lovers Do with SZA became the band's thirteenth American top ten hit.[1] [2] [3] [4]

One month after the album came out, tragedy struck. On the twenty second of December 2017 Jordan Feldstein, the band's manager since the very beginning, was found dead at his Los Angeles home after calling for help. He was forty. The coroner found that a blood clot from his leg had travelled to his lungs, and ruled his death natural. Jordan was Jonah Hill's older brother, and he and Adam had known each other since they were in diapers, as their fathers had been best friends since the age of fourteen. Adam called it one of the saddest moments of his life, said he still broke down and cried, and took on a share of the band's management himself, alongside Irving Azoff and Ash Harrison.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Out of the grief came the band's biggest late career hit. Girls Like You had been a late addition to Red Pill Blues, a song Adam begged the others to include. In May 2018 they released a new version with Cardi B, whom he asked to show her fierceness as a woman. The video, directed by David Dobkin, featured twenty five famous women, including Ellen DeGeneres and Gal Gadot, and Adam personally asked each one. The song spent seven weeks at number one, tied the record for thirty three weeks in the top ten, and stayed at the top of the adult contemporary chart for a record thirty six weeks. Its video has passed four billion views on YouTube.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then Maroon 5 said yes to the Super Bowl. Many artists reportedly turned down the halftime show in solidarity with quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who had knelt during pregame ceremonies to protest police brutality and racism and was no longer signed by any team. A petition urging the band to pull out gathered well over a hundred thousand signatures. The NFL cancelled the usual press conference, and the band, with the NFL and Interscope, donated five hundred thousand dollars to Big Brothers Big Sisters. On the third of February 2019 in Atlanta, with Travis Scott and Big Boi as guests, they played to about a hundred million viewers. Critics widely panned the show, and Adam's shirtless finale drew complaints to the FCC.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Chile, a departure and Jordi

In May 2019 Adam left The Voice after sixteen seasons, handing his chair to Gwen Stefani. Months later the band released Memories, a gentle song built on the chords of Pachelbel's Canon and written in honour of Jordan Feldstein. Its video ends with a dedication to Jordi, as Adam called him. Memories reached number two, making Maroon 5 only the second band after the Rolling Stones to have a top two American hit in three different decades. Then, in February 2020, came a bruising night at Chile's Viña del Mar festival. The band's set was widely criticised as flat, and a backstage video caught Adam grumbling that it had been a television show rather than a concert.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Adam apologised on Instagram, admitting that some things had held him back that night and that his behaviour on stage had been unprofessional. The band's statement blamed technical problems with his in ear monitors, and noted they had arrived amid civil unrest in Chile. Many Chileans were not appeased, and some flooded his Instagram with recipes for traditional Chilean dishes. Weeks later the pandemic shut down touring entirely. Then, on the twenty seventh of June 2020, bassist Mickey Madden was arrested in Los Angeles on a felony domestic violence charge and released on fifty thousand dollars bond.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mickey said he had things he needed to deal with and did not want to be a distraction, and he left the band. The Los Angeles district attorney ultimately declined to prosecute, and no charges were filed. It was not his first brush with the law. In January 2016 he had been arrested in New York's East Village over cocaine, and accepted a deal of one day of community service, while his lawyer insisted he was innocent. Sam Farrar took over on bass. For the first time, the band that began in a Brentwood garage had only two original members left, Adam Levine and Jesse Carmichael.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The seventh album, Jordi, arrived in June 2021, titled after Jordan Feldstein's nickname. It featured guests from Megan Thee Stallion to Stevie Nicks and the late rappers Juice Wrld and Nipsey Hussle. Critics were harsh. The Guardian called it pop at its most shallow and calculating, Pitchfork counted forty seven credited writers, and on Metacritic it scored lower than any other album of 2021. The single Nobody's Love, inspired by the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, stalled at number forty one. In May 2022 the band played at the pyramids of Giza, and PJ Morton said it topped the Super Bowl, because the halftime show had felt like a twelve minute blur.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Scandal, Las Vegas and Love Is Like

In September 2022 Adam faced a personal scandal. An Instagram model named Sumner Stroh posted on TikTok that she and Adam had carried on an affair for about a year, and shared flirtatious messages she said he had sent her. Other women came forward with similar messages. Adam denied having an affair, but admitted he had crossed the line and said he was taking steps to address it with his family. His awkward texts became a wave of mocking internet memes. He and Behati stayed together, and in January 2023 she gave birth to their third child, a son, joining daughters Dusty Rose and Gio Grace.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Maroon 5 settled into a new rhythm. In March 2023 they began their first Las Vegas residency at Dolby Live at Park MGM, which ran on and off until March 2025 and totalled forty shows. That May they released Middle Ground, which Billboard called a return to form, with Behati and their daughters in the video. James Valentine took up pickleball during the Vegas run. In June 2024 NBC announced Adam was returning to The Voice after a ten season break, and as of 2026 he was again one of its coaches. In April 2025 he told Jimmy Fallon a single, an album and a tour were all on the way.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

That single was Priceless, featuring Lisa of Blackpink. Adam said the guitar intro was him playing an unplugged guitar into a voice memo on his phone, and that it made him emotional to reconnect with the band's roots. The eighth album, Love Is Like, followed on the fifteenth of August 2025, with guests including Lil Wayne. This time the members wrote much of the material themselves, as they had in the early days. Reviews were cool, and commercially it was their weakest album yet, peaking at number thirty six on the Billboard 200 and becoming their first album without a top ten hit.[1] [2] [3]

Still, the band kept filling arenas, with the Love Is Like tour running across North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia. In October 2025, ahead of a show in his hometown, the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, briefly renamed a stretch of street James Valentine Boulevard. Maroon 5 have sold more than a hundred and thirty five million records, won three Grammys and scored four American number ones. Adam once said the only way to beat the haters was to stick around so long that people simply get used to you. More than thirty years after Kara's Flowers, they have done exactly that.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Maroon 5

Adam Levine and Jordan Feldstein. Their fathers had been best friends since they were fourteen, and Adam said he knew Jordan from the time they were in diapers. Jordan managed Maroon 5 from its start, built his company Career Artist Management, and negotiated Adam's seat on The Voice. His sudden death in December 2017 devastated Adam, who dedicated Memories to him and named the album Jordi after him.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Adam Levine and Jesse Carmichael. School friends at Brentwood, they started Kara's Flowers together, went off to Five Towns College together, and co-wrote most of Songs About Jane. Jesse stepped away in 2012 to study music and the healing arts, then returned in 2014. He was Adam's best man at his wedding, and they are the last two founding members still in the band.[1] [2] [3]

Adam Levine and Behati Prinsloo. Adam began dating the Namibian model in May 2012, and they married in Mexico in July 2014 with Jonah Hill officiating. They have two daughters and a son born in 2023. Behati has appeared in the videos for Animals, Girls Like You, Middle Ground and All Night. Their marriage survived the 2022 cheating allegations.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Adam Levine and Blake Shelton. Coaches together on The Voice from its first season in 2011, they built a famous on screen frenemy act of teasing and rivalry that fans loved. When Adam left in 2019, host Carson Daly said viewers would miss it. Blake later followed Adam as People's Sexiest Man Alive, only the second musician to get the title.[1] [2] [3]

Adam Levine and Christina Aguilera. Fellow original coaches on The Voice, they turned their on screen rivalry into studio chemistry on Moves like Jagger. Adam wanted a woman's voice to take the edge off the song's bravado, and said she nailed her part almost instantly. The song gave her a fifth American number one and made her, at the time, one of only four women with chart toppers in three different decades.[1] [2] [3]

James Valentine and John Mayer. They met at Berklee College of Music in 1996, and James once tried to persuade Mayer to move to Nebraska and join a local blues band. Years later Mayer fell for Songs About Jane and took Maroon 5 on his 2003 tour, a crucial break. James later played guitar on two songs on Mayer's album Continuum.[1] [2] [3]

Maroon 5 and Ryan Dusick. The founding drummer played on Kara's Flowers records and Songs About Jane, but injuries worsened by constant touring forced him out in 2006. The band credited him as musical director on their second album. In 2022 he published a memoir about making Maroon 5, losing it all and finding recovery, and Adam wrote the foreword.[1] [2] [3]

Maroon 5 and Mickey Madden. Mickey was there from the Brentwood garage to 2020, the only member besides Adam to play continuously until then. He once joked that fame had simply justified Adam's personality. After a 2016 drug arrest and a 2020 domestic violence arrest, in which no charges were ultimately filed, he left the band and Sam Farrar took over bass.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Adam Levine and Benny Blanco. The producer was, in Adam's words, the first person who got him to think outside the band. Blanco co-wrote and produced Moves like Jagger, Payphone, Maps, Animals and Don't Wanna Know, and also produced Stereo Hearts. Adam praised his gift for putting the right people together, though by 2025 he said he had gone back to writing with his own band.[1] [2] [3]

Maroon 5 and Noel and Liam Gallagher. Adam has called Oasis one of the best bands ever, but the love was not returned. Noel Gallagher insulted them in a 2015 interview, reportedly despite having been to a party at Mickey Madden's house, and Liam reportedly said they were terrible. Adam said he would not have it any other way.[1] [2]

Adam Levine and Jane Herman. The woman behind the title of Songs About Jane. Adam said he first saw her at a gas station, wrote her a song and played it in the shop where she worked. She was his muse for years, and he said nearly every song on the debut album had at least one line about her before the relationship faded.[1] [2]

PJ Morton and Maroon 5. Recommended by the band's musical director Adam Blackstone, PJ was the first person to audition as touring keyboardist in 2010. He became a full member in 2012 when Jesse took his break, and stayed after Jesse returned. Alongside the band he built a solo career that has won him six Grammys, and he defended the Super Bowl decision publicly.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Maroon 5

• Adam Levine played his first professional gig at the Troubadour aged about twelve, with his back to the audience. He was so nervous at the famous West Hollywood club that he could not face the crowd, so he turned around and played facing the wall behind him.[1] [2]
• Before Maroon 5 was famous, Kara's Flowers appeared on an episode of Beverly Hills, 90210. In 1997, around the release of their only album, the teenage band landed a guest spot on the hit drama. Adam later said that at the time they thought they were the Beatles.[1] [2]
• In 2000, Kara's Flowers lost UCLA's Spring Sing competition to a then unknown Sara Bareilles. Bareilles later went on to her own pop career and even toured with Maroon 5 in 2007. Sam Farrar also played on her album Kaleidoscope Heart.[1] [2] [3]
• Adam Levine says only one person outside the band knows where the name Maroon 5 came from, Billy Joel. Joel sat down at the band's table at a New York dinner and asked. A starstruck Adam told him, making him the only outsider ever let in on the secret.[1] [2]
• The song that got Maroon 5 signed was Sunday Morning. Octone Records executive Ben Berkman found it in a pile of demos and called it genius. He was surprised it was by Kara's Flowers, a band he had not liked years earlier.[1] [2]
• Actress Rashida Jones sang backing vocals on three songs on Songs About Jane. She can be heard on Tangled, Secret and Not Coming Home, and she returned for a song on It Won't Be Soon Before Long.[1] [2]
• The Sunday Morning video idea came from a Japanese karaoke bar. While in Japan, the band noticed some of their own songs on a karaoke list. The video mixes them recording at Abbey Road with people singing their songs at karaoke.[1]
• Vodafone Australia has used She Will Be Loved as its telephone hold music for twenty years. Since launching in 2004, the phone company has played the song to callers waiting on hold or being transferred.[1]
• George Lucas personally picked Maroon 5 to play his 2005 AFI Life Achievement tribute. They were his children's favourite band at the time, and they played She Will Be Loved at the ceremony.[1] [2]
• James Valentine once stood in for Reel Big Fish's guitarist, twice. When Aaron Barrett broke his hand in 2000 and fell down some stairs in 2001, Valentine filled in on guitar for the ska band.[1]
• Sam Farrar's father is John Farrar, of the Shadows and Olivia Newton-John fame. John Farrar wrote and produced many of Newton-John's biggest hits. Sam's mother, Pat Carroll, was a successful Australian pop singer in the sixties.[1] [2]
• Ryan Dusick was credited as musical director on It Won't Be Soon Before Long, after he had left the band. Although Matt Flynn played drums on the record, the founding drummer who quit in 2006 still received a credit on the album.[1]
• The chorus of Nothing Lasts Forever is shared with Kanye West's Heard 'Em Say. Adam sang on West's 2005 single, which grew from a flight they shared, and reused the same chorus on Maroon 5's second album.[1] [2]
• Makes Me Wonder was stuck without a chorus for about four years. The band finally found one while working on a different song in a Las Vegas studio, simply by changing some chords.[1]
• The cover of Hands All Over was shot by a nineteen year old in her own bedroom. British photographer Rosie Hardy, from Buxton, took the picture herself in under an hour and is also the model in it.[1]
• In 2011 Maroon 5 wrote and recorded a complete song in just twenty four hours for Coca Cola. The song, Is Anybody Out There, was given away free, with Coca Cola promising a clean water donation to Africa if it passed a hundred thousand downloads.[1]
• Maroon 5 once had a Snapple flavour, called Tea Will Be Loved. The band launched it in September 2011 to support the hunger charity Feeding America.[1]
• Maroon 5 replaced Jay-Z at Rock in Rio in 2011 at the last minute. When Jay-Z cancelled for personal reasons, the band was added to the Rio de Janeiro bill on the first of October 2011.[1]
• The bass line in One More Night borrows from the Police's The Bed's Too Big Without You. The reggae tinged hit spent nine weeks at number one, and the band has long cited the Police as a major influence.[1] [2]
• In the Sugar video, only the grooms knew Maroon 5 would crash the weddings. The grooms were told only that a famous Grammy winning band was coming. A drop down curtain hid the band until the surprise.[1]
• Adam Levine was the first singer to be named People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive. He got the title in 2013, becoming only the second non actor after John F. Kennedy Junior.[1]
• Adam Levine declined to be paid for his role in the film Begin Again. Director John Carney considered no one else for the part, and Adam won it after a Skype conversation and a recorded audition.[1]
• Adam once tweeted that celebrity fragrances should be banned, then launched his own. His scent arrived in 2013 in microphone shaped bottles, a year after he joked that celebrity perfumes should be punishable by death.[1] [2]
• Adam chose not to have a bar mitzvah as a boy. He said too many kids seemed to be cashing in on the gifts, and it did not feel like a respectful way to honour his faith and heritage.[1]
• Jesse Carmichael's solo project is called 1863, after the year of the Emancipation Proclamation. He also has a side project called Circuit Jerks, which released a remix of Maps.[1] [2]
• PJ Morton set out to restore the New Orleans home of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden. The house, owned by his father's church, had been cited for demolition by neglect. Morton planned a museum and community space there.[1]
• Girls Like You spent a record thirty six weeks at number one on Billboard's adult contemporary chart. It broke the previous record of twenty eight weeks, held by Uncle Kracker's Drift Away.[1]
• The Super Bowl show included a SpongeBob clip after a petition passed a million signatures. Fans wanted the song Sweet Victory to honour SpongeBob's late creator. They got only a brief clip, which annoyed many of them.[1]
• Maroon 5's sales jumped nearly five hundred percent after their widely panned Super Bowl show. Despite the reviews, Nielsen reported the huge surge in the band's sales right after the performance.[1]
• Chilean fans answered Adam's 2020 festival outburst by flooding his Instagram with recipes. After he was filmed grumbling backstage at Viña del Mar, Chileans posted recipes for traditional Chilean dishes in his comments.[1] [2]
• James Valentine got a street named after him in his hometown, briefly. In October 2025, ahead of a Maroon 5 show, Lincoln, Nebraska, temporarily renamed part of Canopy Street as James Valentine Boulevard.[1]
• The guitar intro of Priceless was recorded on an iPhone voice memo. Adam played it on an unplugged guitar straight into his phone, and said it made him emotional to reconnect with the band's early sound.[1]
• Adam Levine and Jonah Hill's fathers have been best friends since they were fourteen. That is how Adam grew up with Jonah and his late brother Jordan Feldstein, who became Maroon 5's manager.[1] [2]
• Songs About Jane took twenty six months to reach the American top ten. It was the longest wait for an album's first top ten appearance since modern sales tracking began in 1991.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.