Maroon 5

Maroon 5 formed in Los Angeles in 1994 under the name Kara's Flowers, comprising high-school friends Adam Levine, Jesse Carmichael, Mickey Madden, and Ryan Dusick; they signed to Reprise Records and released an album, The Fourth World, in 1997 before the label dropped them. After adding guitarist James Valentine in 2001 and renaming themselves Maroon 5, they secured a deal with Octone Records and recorded Songs About Jane, a tightly crafted funk-rock debut that became a slow-burn commercial sensation, it spent 26 weeks on the Billboard 200 and eventually sold over 10 million copies worldwide. The band followed with It Won't Be Soon Before Long (2007) and Hands All Over (2010), both of which still featured predominantly band-written material, though the lineup shifted when founding drummer Ryan Dusick stepped away in 2006 due to a repetitive-stress injury and was replaced by Matt Flynn. Beginning with Overexposed (2012), Max Martin served as executive producer and the band progressively ceded songwriting control to professional pop hitmakers, a strategic pivot that yielded a string of top-ten hits including 'Payphone,' 'One More Night,' 'Maps,' 'Animals,' 'Sugar,' 'Don't Wanna Know,' and 'Girls Like You.' The band's later albums, V (2014), Red Pill Blues (2017), and JORDI (2021), are largely the product of professional songwriting rooms featuring names like Max Martin, Shellback, Ryan Tedder, Benny Blanco, and Jacob Kasher Hindlin, with Levine retaining a co-writing credit on most songs but the rest of the band largely absent from writing credits.