It was short but sweet at the MGM Grand at Foxwoods with Maroon 5 giving fans a 14-song set
Maroon 5
MASHANTUCKET _ In an effort to drum up business for their upcoming release “Overexposed” the members of rock / pop band Maroon 5 performed a set in the Grand Theater at the MGM Grand at Foxwoods on Thursday night.
Along with the new recording, the band is scheduled to release the 10th Anniversary edition of “Songs About Jane,” the breakthrough record from 2002 that gained Maroon 5 three hit singles and a Grammy award as Best New Artist.
Add to all of that the success of front man Adam Levine’s stewardship of the NBC hit “The Voice” and you’ve got a lot of buzz surrounding the Los Angeles-based music group.
Overexposed, indeed.
Perhaps as a way to counter all this exposure, Levine and his charges spent relatively little time on the stage on Thursday night, offering a set that came in just under an hour. The group managed to pull together just 14 songs for the sold out house and had to stretch out the encore of “She Will Be Loved,” to make it all seem worthwhile.
In their defense, the Maroon 5 recognizable catalog is only three deep at this point. However, their string of hits and the material from the upcoming release is more than enough to give the industry standard 90-minute presentation.
The band opened with a snippet of the Gym Class Heroes (featuring Levine) hit “Stereo Hearts,” which morphed into the band’s own “This Love.”
From “Harder to Breathe,” to “Sunday Morning” the group rode a line somewhere between Matchbox Twenty and Train but moved right into band-boy fluff with “Misery.”
One could argue the merits of re-mastering and re-releasing an album that came out in 2002 (“Songs About Jane”) but Levine said the band would be celebrating that release on the tour and offered up “Tangled” as an example.
It was on to the new with current single “Payphone” and then the set closing “Sweetest Goodbye.” With the crowd begging for more (and why not, it was only five minutes past nine), the band returned to encore with “Moves Like Jagger,” “Hands All Over,” and “She Will Be Loved.”
Javier Colon, winner of the inaugural season of “The Voice” served as the opening act and began his 20 minute set by channeling Adele and her hit single “Someone Like You.” The Connecticut native and Hartt School grad also offered up his current single “A Drop in the Ocean.”