Having catapulted onto the national scene as a conventional rock artist following his runner-up finish on Idols South Africa in 2011, Mark Haze is trying to do things a little different now.
His latest single, Better Than This, is a significant shift from the Mark Haze we’ve known over the years - an artist often confined to high notes and slamming guitar solos.
Born out of his desire to escape the stifling label of "rock star" he’d experienced while signed to Universal Music, which he recently left, Better Than This is Haze’s first step in trying to prove that he’s got a lot more to offer.
“While I’m good at rock and I do do rock music, a lot of my influences growing up were blues and soul artists like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Michael Jackson,” he said during a short break from his gym session. “So a lot of that style is embedded in me and, now that I’m not part of the label, I’ve decided to write music like that and I’ve changed my band around a little bit to make it work.”
While he was working through this transition and writing a few different songs, Haze experimented with hip hop beats and synth sounds. He also went back to writing with his former writing partner, Bjorn Faree.
Despite Faree being primarily a rock musician in terms of how he writes, Haze says his songs are good enough to transcend genres.
“He came to me with this idea and sang it to me” - Haze mimics the tune of the song - “and I thought it was really catchy. So he told me that he’d written this piece and he wanted me to write some lyrics over it and see where I went with it.”
With his aim set on showing the world that he’s more than a one-trick pony, he went home that day and worked tirelessly on it.
Better Than This, which he tells me he’d performed live on the Expresso Show earlier in the day, is the beginning of a whole host of singles that he’s planning on releasing throughout 2017.
“I put a bold statement out on television this morning that I really want to do my best to be able to bring out a single a month.
“It’s a feat and a half and I don’t know if it’s going to work or if I’m going to live up to it. I even said on TV that I hope I’m not telling fibs in front of the whole country right now. But that’s the plan.”
Right now he has three singles lined up, which he hopes will cover him for the next few months.
His next single, titled Shake What Your Mama Gave You, is an attempt to try and align himself with the trendy “disco, dance, happy feel to music”, with his own twist. Then he plans on releasing a ballad called Soul, which is a song he wrote about 15 years ago when his grandfather passed away.
Although he only started doing music full-time much later, the Mark Haze brand has been in motion since the early 2000s when he led a band called 12th Avenue, so named after the street he grew up in.
He says 12th Avenue, which had a bit of a cult following all those years ago, had two number one hits on radio.
He speaks fondly of winning the American Idol Experience during his visit to Orlando, Florida in 2011 and how that gave him the confidence to enter Idols South Africa.
It’s been a roller-coaster for Haze and he hopes that with more stability and calm, 2017 will unfold as the year of Mark Haze.
“That’s what I’m hoping for. I just want to kind of flood the market and remind everyone that music is sort of an open playing field; you don’t have to be pegged as anything.
“I mean, when Kanye started singing instead of rapping, I think everyone kind of turned around in shock. Such is happening in our country and all around the world, music as an art form is continuously evolving.”
When I ask him if the plan with all this music is to release a project, he says: “For the first time in my life the plan is not to have a plan. I’m a Christian and in terms of Christianity, you’re supposed to throw away all ambitions and let Jesus take the wheel. It’s all about quieting your mind and letting what will happen happen.”
Haze admits that he’s quite a forceful person by nature and, typically, if he wants something to happen he’ll make it happen. But something’s shifted and all he wants to focus on now is the path of being a world-class musician.