Jason Mraz – I Won't Give Up
2012 · Directed by Mark Pellington
1.3M Likes
Best comments
1.“This was my song with my ex. She gave up. Lol.”
More comments
- 2.“I'm going to have to sing this badly to her someday soon and make a complete fool of myself... God damn you, Jason.”
- 3.“I'm 61 and love this song. Army vet, and I'll love my wife till the day I die. Yes, I will dance in the kitchen late at night with her. That's the way life is.”
The story
Jason Mraz wrote I Won't Give Up with Michael Natter, an amateur singer-guitarist he met on the coffee shop and open mic circuit. It came out of a stretch of activist work: cleaning up after the Gulf oil spill, a trip to Ghana with the anti-slavery group Free the Slaves, and a trip to Antarctica with Al Gore. He has said he mostly wrote it for himself, to sort out his own life and relationships, and that it fits sticking with any dream, not just a lover.
It was the first single from Love Is a Four Letter Word and debuted at number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 on 229,000 downloads in its first week. It has since gone six times platinum in the US.
Mark Pellington directed the video, out in February 2012. It's a flow of faces and sun-drenched nature shots, young and old, filmed partly at a rock quarry in Southern California. Some of the people on camera have lived through real emotional or physical loss, a disabled US Marine among them. Critics compared it to Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Mraz said the idea was simple: everybody is carrying something, and everybody has a few things they refuse to let go of.
