Jason Mraz: Dog whisperer?
I have a complicated history with Jason Mraz. I first saw him open for DMB in 2002, before anyone knew who we was (or more importantly, for the announcers and DJ's at the show, how to pronounce his name)... and he was awful. Awful. The worst live performance I've seen before or since. So then, within a few years, I saw his name on the charts and whatnot, and I thought it was another example of the music industry force-feeding consumers bad music for so long long that Stockholm syndrome set in and people decided it wasn't so bad, after all. I resisted.
But when I was in California in August, I found myself watching VH1 at 4am a few days in a row (I hate jetlag) and completely went dorky for I'm Yours (along with every 16-year-old with blue nail polish in the country, I know). I was embarrassed by this lapse in taste, but what are you gonna do? I wound up buying the whole CD and being pleasantly surprised.
But nothing could surprise me more than what happened next: I discovered that Sydney, who is not (I assure you) the perfectly-behaved Platonic ideal of a golden retriever she appears to be when working, decided to start barking at me the other day. I had food, she wanted it, and that was that. The typical ways of deescalating the situation only excited her more, and when my tactic of just yelling "I'm not listening to you and you're not getting my food so nyah" over and over like an 8-year-old didn't work, desperate measures were needed. So I started singing. "Well you dawned on me and you bet I felt it" -- silence, cocked head... "I tried to be chill, but you're so hot that I melted" -- sitting down... "I fell right through the cracks, now I'm trying to get back"... score! Sydney's on the ground, head averted, with a big sigh -- which any handler knows is body language for "you stupid human, I'm not even going to try to get my point across anymore."
Subsequent experiments show that this effect is seen in limited measure with Ari Hest's When Everything Seems Wrong, but I'm Yours is by far the most powerful crazy-dog antidote.
Documentary evidence forthcoming.