Arnold Zwicky's Blog

“Song for a Friend” by Jason Mraz came by today on an iTunes random playlist, and I recalled that Mraz was on my iTunes because of suggestions from Nassira Nicola for language-related musical items (performer names, album titles, song titles, lyrics mentioning language-related stuff), among them Mraz’s song “Wordplay”. Here’s the chorus from the song (minus the la-la-la bits):

Now listen closely to the verse I lay
It’s all about the wordplay
The wonderful thing it does
Because, because
I am the wizard of ooh’s and ah’s and fa-la-la’s
Yeah the Mister A to Z
They say I’m all about the wordplay

Even better, the album is entitled Mr. A-Z, so of course I had to have it.

Which came first, you ask, the album title or the family name? The family name — it’s a Czech name (Mraz is of Czech descent) — so the title is a bit of, um, wordplay.

The album (from 2005) is his second release on a major label (his first, in 2002, was Waiting For My Rocket To Come, with a nice titular ambiguity that I’m not going to try to adjudicate here). The music is pop with a hip-hop tinge, including the exuberant wordplay.

Here’s another shot of Mraz, this time in the classic guitar-concealing-privates pose, goofing around non-linguistically:

This entry was posted on July 12, 2010 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Language and music, Language play. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.