With just an acoustic guitar and a penchant for speedy wordplay and speedier scatting, Jason Mraz charmed his way onto the charts in 2003 with “The Remedy” from his debut album, Waiting for My Rocket to Come, which quietly climbed the charts to become a multi-million seller around the world. Mraz’s next two albums, Mr. A-Z in 2005 and the wonderfully titled We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things. in 2008, both debuted in the Top 10 in the US. The latter album proved to be another sensation with multi-platinum certifications and multiple Grammy accolades. The album included the Mraz penned “I’m Yours,” a song that has the honor of being on the Billboard Hot 100 longer than any other song in the 51-year history of the chart, and is the first song ever to top the charts at four different radio formats in the US. The acoustic, reggae-tinged love tune is dubbed by Mraz as “my happy little hippie song.” An avid surfer, charitable person and avocado farmer, Mraz is always eager to speak about how we can better preserve our environment.

Mraz is something of a throwback, a pop folkie at heart whose music tends to connect without large-scale productions. He has the soul of a busker, a guy happy to play his songs for anybody who will listen. In that sense he’s of a kind with so many singer-songwriters from the 1970s, when the simplicity of a song was sometimes enough to put it over. Mraz has picked a whopper of a single to cover: Norman Greenbaum’s, “Spirit In the Sky.” The surreal spiritual classic that informed its listeners, “you gotta have a friend in Jesus,” put a religious tone with a bluesy guitar riff and ended up a No. 3 hit in 1970, selling more than 2 million copies. Greenbaum was a journeyman before his success, having flirted with success in the ’60s with some psychedelic pop recording as Dr. West’s Medicine Show and Junk Band.

Mraz performed this song last October at the Cricket Wireless Amphitheatre in Chula Vista, California, for the sole purpose of making a friend of his dance (it’s the friend’s favorite song). Mraz was charmed by the song during rehearsals with the Voices Of Prayze Choir in his studio, who performed on stage during the recording.