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MArk Ronson plays with the wire that connects his phone to the speaker of the hotel room. He presses Play and rushes to reappear when the last notes disappear. That's really good, I tell him, because it is. The song that he plays is the title song of his next album, Late Night Feelings, and succeeds the old disco tour consisting of sounding both euphoric and desiring. The track contains the kind of choir – sung by Lykke Li – which you think will be inevitable for the rest of the year. He nods. "I think these are my best …" He stopped and rolled his eyes. "Well, of course, I'm going to sit in front of you and say something like that." Then he presses the play key on the phone and rushes out of the room again.
It's certainly an unusual way to listen to one of the most anticipated pop albums of the year, a so-called "sad bangers" collection that also houses Nothing Breaks Like a Heart, Ronson's collaboration with Miley Cyrus who, on the day meet him, has made his home in the Top 10 of Belgium in Lebanon. But Mark Ronson is very attentive to listening to music while another person listens to your music.
Famous as a nice guy, he also has a reputation for assuming the harsh climate himself. The last time I met him, it was in 2015. His 2010 album, Record Collection, was sold "a lot less" than his breakthrough in 2007, Version, and he thought that He was "cold". But at that time, Uptown Funk was establishing itself as one of the greatest singles of the decade and I arrived in his studio just as he was receiving a bottle of champagne celebrating his house. discs. "I sent this to try to look good in front of a journalist," he murmured when I mentioned it, before telling me that the stress of making this single had made him sick, was vomiting and causing him hair at various times to fall. When he played Uptown Funk to his stepfather, AOR Foreigner's Mick Jones, Jones had innocently asked if the guitar was played by Nile Rodgers. "So, here," he said. "I finally made an album so good that people do not think it's me."
Uptown Funk has won two Grammys and has become not only one of the best selling singles of the decade, but of all time: 20 million copies and more. The accompanying album, Uptown Special – which featured collaborations with everyone, from Stevie Wonder to novelist Michael Chabon, who provided the lyrics – split it into the United States, a country that was previously immune to the charm of his solo work. He formed Silk City with his friend and co-producer Diplo – "When the kind of crap piano chords I'd like to hit on his drums, it sounded accidentally like a piano house from the 80s or 90s – and their collaboration in 2018 with Dua Lipa, Electricity, was another. global success.
He produced Lady Gaga's album Joanne – whose title has just won a Grammy – and it's an album that had the kind of influence on pop that Amy Winehouse's Back to Black work had done. a decade ago. He sent other artists in a similar, rooted and analogous direction: it was said that everything from Kesha's Rainbow to Golden from Kylie Minogue to Man of the Woods was inspired by it. Making this album, he co-wrote Shallow, a duet between Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper for the soundtrack of A Star Is Born: another transatlantic number 1, he won two Grammys and a Golden Globe for the best song. in the same category at the Oscars this weekend.
And yet, Ronson self-condemns to a fault. Today, her description of the creation of Shallow involves giving a lot of credit to everyone involved – Lady Gaga had the idea of the chorus and the words "that made my hair stand up"; his usual collaborators, Andrew Wyatt and former Libertine Anthony Rossomando, created the guitar part and Cooper had the idea of making it a duet – which he sounded like his own. he was standing right there and watching the rest of them. . To hear, all Late Night Feelings associates had to be persuaded to get involved, rather than claiming to work with someone who currently seems to be a successful machine. "They probably thought I was a wheeler pop dealer," he shrugs when I raise an unconvinced eyebrow.
He said that he felt no pressure following the success of Uptown Funk because it was "an anomaly, it is clearly something that will only happen once in his life". But it should be noted that virtually all of Ronson's success seems strangely abnormal. Who would have thought that Amy Winehouse's second album, one of the many vaguely jazzy and / or neo-soul singers who toured at the time, would become a classic? Who could have predicted that the cover of a modest success single by the Zutons in a 60's soul style would become one of the most immortal singles of his era? And despite his apparent dominance in modern pop, he says he feels out of step with the current climate, where "all your songs must last less than three minutes and 15 seconds, because if people do not listen to them until the end they fall into this proportion of "uncompleted hearings," which lowers your Spotify score, and songwriters are forced to produce hits quickly.
"Everyone shows how quickly they write songs because of the way pop music is created," he says. "People are like," Yeah man, we wrote this song in 30 minutes "and I feel like," Yeah, and it sounds like you wrote it in 30 minutes. "There are things written at that time that are great, damn – Amy wrote Back to Black in 10 minutes, but most of the time, I think the quality has dropped to a point where everything is fine, where I do not I would not feel comfortable doing it with my own music.
Indeed, he wonders if his most famous production work would have been a success in 2019. "Everything must be produced so that the sound is as competitive as possible from an iPhone or as loud as possible to the exit from a Spotify. playlist hits; you have to make sure that the bass drum and the guitar have the same power and the same presence throughout the fucking song, otherwise you will not have a chance. It's a little crazy to think about music now. I mean, Amy would not let that shit happen for a second, which makes me think of how Back to Black would have been received, or how it would probably have worked badly on Spotify playlists if she was out today. "
He explained that the creation of Late Night Feelings was complex and "emotionally challenging". He had started making a completely different album when, during projects with Diplo, SZA and Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, he had a crisis of confidence in the studio. "Kevin is so talented that it's almost intimidating to be in the studio with him, so I leave him a lot. Diplo has his own work school where there are a lot of kids on laptops, and I was starting to become one of those guys who stood in front of people: "Why do not you try to transform hat in hat? " not who I am – I was starting to lose my mark on the music I was doing. But I think it suited my emotional state and what I was able to handle.
He could not bear much because his marriage to French model and actor Joséphine de La Baume had collapsed in 2017. "I started floundering," he says. "I drank too much and gave orders over people's backs and shit. So I went into a new studio in Los Angeles and basically said to the engineer, "Show me how that shit works and take the month off." I went back to doing what I did. A habit to do, to be alone in the studio. If it does not start with me, if it's not the ground floor, then it's not my record. "
He ended up giving up what he had done and writing new songs inspired by his divorce, with the help of a team of collaborators who, coincidentally, "were experiencing their own breakups at the same time , so I do not know if that's why we met unconsciously, "including Lykke Li and King Princess, the singer-songwriter performed at the hottest tip, signed for Ronson's label, Zelig . "My stuff usually comes from the groove and an interesting bass line, but everything that comes with a groove and a bass line but not the kind of sadness that is associated with it, it just fell to me. gap. Do you know I said last time I did something good enough that people do not believe it's me? I feel like this time, I created something so emotional that people do not believe it's me. These are just better songs. I like the last album, I do not deny it at all, but it had a scientific aspect, forcing Michael Chabon to write intelligent lyrics of which I am not able. It's a personal record. "
He wishes to emphasize that the results are not exclusively about divorce and grief: the title should not only evoke misery, but "everything that prevents you from sleeping at night, whether it is sadness, lust," 39, anguish or whore Brexit, or hearing Kavanaugh or something else.
The concept of the album "sad bangers" has already started a club night, the Heartbreak Club, designed, smiles at Ronson, for "people who want what to cry on the dance floor: nothing from Only Love Can Break Your Heart from St Etienne to Go! from Common, to Ariana Grande's No Tears Left to Cry. "He plans to do a tour of the album this way -" taking a giant broken heart-shaped mirror balloon and putting it in the middle of the room to play music "- and he's currently working on the next Cyrus album. Apart from that, he says, he does not know what the future holds for him, nor even if he will make another album. "I'm still competitive, I do not want to be out of the game, even though this album is the last one I can play with, I do not know, it's like the last one right now, because this is the first time I put everything in a record I do not know what's left. "He shrugs." Maybe another life experience could happen in three years but … I feel like the tank is a little empty. "
This seems to be a very way Mark Ronson to end an interview. "I know I can be self-deprecating," he smiles. "We talked about anomalies before. How many times can you have an anomaly before leaving, well, OK, I have to be good at something? I can not just be nosy every time, can I? I really feel like I have created something that has depth and emotion. "
And then the normal service is resumed. "These are things," he says, "that I may not have expected from one of my archives."
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