Dr. Martens shirt; Paul Smith sunglasses; Levine’s own A.P.C. jeans and Rolex watch (throughout).


I’M IN MY APARTMENT TRYING TO DO SOME WORK ON MY LAPTOP, but my mind is elsewhere. It’s actually at a paaay- phone, trying to call home... Last summer was different. I wasn’t stuck at a pay phone, but I did have mo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-oves like Jagger. Or at least I thought I did because a voice in my head told me so, over and over and over.

The voice belonged to Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about, then you probably haven’t been near a radio for more than five minutes in the past few years to hear his 2011 hit “Moves Like Jagger” or the chart-topper “Payphone,” from Maroon 5’s most recent album, Overexposed. If you had, chances are they’d be on replay in your head too.

With songwriting skills and a soaring voice to match, Levine has the rare ability to create melodies that infiltrate the minds of millions. It’s not an easy feat. Ph.D.’s using MRI machines to study people with songs stuck in their heads (the phenomenon has a scientific name: spontaneous auditory imagery) aren’t able to figure out the secret sauce that makes it happen. The only thing they’ve been able to prove is that in order for a song to catch on, it first has to infect the songwriter.

When I share this with Levine, he nods. “I’ll hum the tunes that we write in the shower because they’re stuck in my head,” he says. “I mean, we don’t take scans of people brains, but in order for a song to work for people, it has to work for me.” The strategy seems to be successful so far.

At 33, Levine’s been making music for almost half his lifetime. His first band, Kara’s Flowers, released an album in 1997, when he was just a senior at Brentwood School in Los Angeles. A few years later, the band—Levine, keyboardist Jesse Carmichael, bassist Mickey Madden, and drummer Ryan Dusick—teamed up with guitarist James Valentine to form Maroon 5, and they released Songs About Jane in 2002. That album featured the first of many hits, including “Harder to Breathe” and “This Love.”