Maroon 5 is an American pop rock band from Los Angeles, California, whose origins date to 1994 when four students at the private Brentwood School — vocalist and guitarist Adam Levine (born March 18, 1979), keyboardist Jesse Carmichael, bassist Mickey Madden, and drummer Ryan Dusick — formed a band called Kara's Flowers. The group signed with Reprise Records, released their debut album The Fourth World in 1997 while still in high school, and were dropped from the label when the album failed to gain traction. Levine briefly attended Five Towns College in New York before returning to Los Angeles in 2000 to reconvene the band, now with guitarist James Valentine added to the lineup. They renamed themselves Maroon 5, signed with Octone Records, and released Songs About Jane in June 2002.
Songs About Jane — written largely about Levine's ex-girlfriend — was not an immediate commercial success, but slow-building radio play for Harder to Breathe and then This Love generated momentum across more than two years until the album broke into the Billboard top ten in August 2004. She Will Be Loved became a top five single. By the time Maroon 5 won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist at the 47th Grammy Awards in February 2005, the band had technically been together for ten years and the album was three years old. Songs About Jane went on to be certified six times platinum in the United States. Their influences — Stevie Wonder, Prince, Michael Jackson — were apparent in the funk-inflected soul sound that distinguished them from the post-grunge and pop-punk contemporaries with whom they were initially grouped.
It Won't Be Soon Before Long (2007) produced Makes Me Wonder, which reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. Moves Like Jagger (2011), featuring Christina Aguilera and released from the Hands All Over re-issue, topped the Hot 100 for four weeks and accumulated over a billion YouTube views, becoming one of the band's signature songs and cementing a shift toward a more mainstream pop identity. Adam Levine joined NBC's The Voice as a judge and coach in 2011, substantially amplifying the band's public profile and introducing them to a television audience. The run of number one singles continued with One More Night from Overexposed (2012), Girls Like You featuring Cardi B from Red Pill Blues (2017) — seven weeks at number one — and the catalog has accumulated 32 Billboard Hot 100 appearances, 15 top ten hits, and four number one singles. Maroon 5 headlined Super Bowl LIII halftime show in February 2019 in Atlanta alongside Big Boi and Travis Scott. Memories (2019), written in tribute to the band's manager Jordan Feldstein who died in December 2017, became another major hit. Jordi (2021) was their most recent studio album. The band has won three Grammy Awards and accumulated over 37 billion streams globally.
Wayne Dennon photographed Maroon 5 as part of an archive that documents Los Angeles music across its full commercial spectrum. Maroon 5 is the rare band that took a failed start, rebuilt entirely, and produced a catalog that has remained on pop radio for over two decades — and Songs About Jane, the album that launched them, still holds up as the most complete artistic statement of everything they were capable of doing.
