Feeling blue or some other hue? Drop the needle down on Mayer Hawthorne’s just-out A Strange Arrangement record and take a trip down false-memory lane, where the slo-burn stylings of the great soul brothers and sisters of yore offered such sweet solace. It’s music that can do wonders for your heart and your mind.

Mayer Hawthorne is a nom de plume, a guise, a persona, a context in which the singer (born Andrew Mayer Cohen) can lay down some of the most sweetly, satisfyingly soulful music since the glory days of the Motown/Philly soul legends from which it draws its blood.

Some facts about Mayer Hawthorne:

“I grew up on the south side of Detroit, in Ann Arbor,” he says. “I come from a very musical family — my dad played bass guitar, and he taught me to play when I was real young. He still plays in the band. My mom was a piano player; she made me take piano lessons, which I hated.”

Hawthorne’s been making music in Detroit for most of his life, both messing around with multiple instruments and tape recorders in his bedroom, and as a DJ obsessed with hip-hop. He decided to move to L.A. a few years ago with his hip-hop crew, which is how he hooked up with Peanut Butter Wolf at Stones Throw. The famously knowledgeable PB Wolf got hold of a couple of rich and tasty soul-inspired-type tracks that Hawthorne had brought for him to check out. Wolf thought it was some from-the-vaults typa thing, it sounded so good. “These must be cover versions,” he recalls thinking, “now, why haven’t I heard them before? I want more.”