Maroon 5's Las Vegas residency just makes sense.
Following the opening night of his band's new concert series, Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine chatted with PEOPLE about their new venture, and how the importance of family played a large role in crafting the Sin City residency, which is close to the band's home base of Los Angeles.
"I think we've kind of gotten to the point where we've almost just done it all. We've been doing it for this crazy long amount of time, and so we thought [a Vegas residency] was kind of the logical next step because it was something that we had never embarked upon," Levine, 44, told PEOPLE. "Also, over the years, Vegas has become this kind of beacon for everybody. ... The timing of it all just makes sense to us."
The three-time Grammy winners kicked off their M5LV residency at Park MGM's Dolby Live Theater on Friday with some familiar faces in the audience, including Levine's wife, Behati Prinsloo, and two of their children, daughters Dusty Rose, 6, and Gio Grace, 5. (The pair are also parents to a newborn baby, whom they welcomed in January.)
Levine also got emotional when addressing his father, Fred, who was on hand as well.
"It was a big opening night in Vegas," Levine said. "It's close to home and no one has to deal with, you know, traveling 10 hours with kids and jet lag."
"It felt right. It felt really, really sweet to have everybody here. I wouldn't have wanted to do it without them," he added of his brood.
Throughout the nearly two-hour show, Maroon 5 whips through 22 songs, perhaps none more sentimental than 2019's "Memories," which is based on the loss of the band's manager and Levine's friend, Jordan "Jordi" Feldstein, who died in 2017 of a heart attack.
Prior to the performance of the song, Jordi is honored on the theater's screens.
"It's always hard [to perform that song.] It'll never be easy," Levine said of "Memories."
He added, "It's not easy to share that part of us, but it's kind of important and necessary to talk about it at a certain point. I think enough time had passed where we had been able to process some amount of it to be able to share it with people and celebrate who he was and who he still is to us and our history."
With over 96 million albums sold worldwide and nine singles with over 1 billion streams, there's no question the band has had quite a history.
"Twenty years feels like the first chapter of our career, and we have now a collection of songs that I feel like we can bring to Vegas and that stand up on their own," lead guitarist James Valentine told PEOPLE. "I think somebody coming in off the [Las Vegas] Strip can come in and see the band and be like, 'Oh yeah, I know all these songs.' That's a good position for us to be in."
The band is far from done, too, but they're keeping new music close to the vest.
"We have something coming that's very, very special. I think the best thing we've done in a long time," Levine teased. "That's all I'm going to say on that."
