Jason Mraz: Rocket Man.

Waiting For My Rocket To Come is in stores now.

Jason Mraz is a great believer in the fine art of booing. As in hiss-boo, not tears. In fact, he gets his audiences to join him for a good boo at the end of his shows. “There isn’t enough booing these days,” Mraz says. “And it is quite cathartic. So I encourage them to boo about anything or anybody that is on their mind.”

It’s an odd tactic but nonetheless quite fitting in these weird times. A good communal Boo at George Bush would seem appropriate.

“Yeah, I know, don’t remind me about him,” Jason says. “I’m thinking about making this a very extended holiday at the moment. In some ways America is the last place you want to be.”

And sitting in Bondi looking out at the beach, despite the California dreaming connotations, Mraz recalls his adopted home San Diego. “I’m convinced it’s the most beautiful city in the US,” he says. “Everybody is laidback, there’s very diverse music scene and you see the same people in the audience at shows whether it’s Turkish, Latin-American, pop, rock.”

Jason Mraz is the dream-come-true kid. He’s the one in 10,000 that a major record company - in this case Warners - plucks from obscurity and aims squarely - and with budget - at the stars. His debut album, Waiting For My Rocket To Come, is a nicely balanced and musically diverse debut that finds the native Virginian showing he’s got a deft lyrical touch and an ear for a melody. It the current drift in music towards singer/songwriters he’s emerged at just the right time.

He’s the smalltown kid who might just make it. Smalltown being the unlikely-named Mechanicsville.

“When it was founded in the early 1800s there was a lot going on just outside the city of Richmond (Mechanicsville is nine miles away as the crow flies),” Mraz says. “It was the kind of place in which to build everything. There were a lot of blacksmiths.” But is it me... or isn’t the notion of mechanics a little newer. On the other hand maybe not, it does come from the Latin ‘mechanicus’ and Greek ‘mechanikos’. This blinding piece of useless information will, no doubt, keep you awake at nights.”

Not Jason. “When I lived there I didn’t even think about that,” he says. “It had become shopping malls and suburbia. Just a small town.  We had to entertain ourselves so as a kid I would sit in my room and make videos or sing songs. That’s why, when I graduated, I had to get out of there.”

Some highways and byways later he ended up in San Diego in April 1999 where he met “a cat named Java Joe” who let him play in his coffee shop. The initial audience of two or three or six every Thursday night quickly grew until the nights became sold out events. It was here he developed his live craft, working on the notion of converting one person at a time: “It gave me a chance to work in my show, my attitude and my songs.” It also worked out.

That kind of word-of-mouth popularity is priceless and the open-mike kid found himself graduating to bigger stages with a band in tow.  Buzzed out of his mind by his experiences he keeps a genuinely wide-eyed diary on his web site - and he updates it regularly and often quite lengthily. The same growing into the world touches his songs and you feel and young man just beginning to find his feet and stride out.

And he still dreams. First, they’re his music and his songs. Jason says he’s still figuring out what’s going on there. How they come together, where they come from. Later, when he’s ‘old’ - like “maybe my 30s or 40s I might go into films,” he comments. “I did some acting in high school and a little in college (he actually did a short stint at New York’s American Musical and Dramatic Academy). I realised I needed to get experience and travel before getting in front of a camera and playing pretend.”

“Now I’m too young, too skinny, too pale. There was a cat in Melbourne yesterday who yelled ‘get a tan’. It’s one thing at a time. I can’t really quite believe how far we’ve already come. As we drove into Sydney today I couldn’t really believe I was here. A year ago I was sitting in a coffee shop in San Diego playing a tune to whoever wanted to listen.”