Going Gaga over Ronson
The British music producer has conquered the music world, despite a broken heart.
Three factors affected the tone and tenor of British musician and producer Mark Ronson’s fourth album, each of them falling like dominoes in the years preceding its release. One: working with pop singer-songwriter Lady Gaga on Joanne, an intensely personal record influenced by the death of the singer’s aunt. As seen in the Netflix documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two, Ronson was there every step of the way, as producer, co-writer and instrumentalist, while the pop star crafted a stripped-back, country-inspired set with few production frills. By subtracting the larger-than-life costumed personas and putting a vulnerable performer at centre stage, Joanne drew a line under the Gaga the world had come to know and love as a best-selling artist and propelled her into the next stage of her career.
Two: producing Villains, the seventh album by Californian rock band Queens of the Stone Age. Led by Josh Homme — the singer, songwriter and guitarist Ronson describes as a “six-foot-four, beautiful man-Viking with a poet’s sensitive soul” — the group has long mixed masculine with feminine factors, from the band name to hard-edged, fast-paced arrangements offset by the singer’s easy preference for falsetto. Among its nine tracks were some delicate songs written with Homme’s family in mind, including Villains of Circumstance, a sprawling ballad of longing that emerges from gloomy ruminations to end the album on an uplifting note.
Three: while working on Villains with the quintet he readily names as his favourite band — no small compliment from the 43-year-old considering his vast musical knowledge and experience — Ronson was going through a painful life transition of his own.
“I was making that record while the last six months of my marriage were falling apart, so there were probably some stressors,” he tells Review on the phone from Los Angeles in early June. “But it was a wonderful thing, while I was going through this fairly intense personal period, to go to the studio with five very solid dudes. If I was working with someone who’d maybe demanded a bit more of me emotionally, or something that was a little more fraught, I might not have been able to do that.”
After Joanne and Villains — with a two-week detour to write for A Star is Born, the 2018 film starring Lady Gaga whose mega-hit song Shallow Ronson co-wrote — he began to focus on his fourth solo album. But where his last release, 2015’s Uptown Special, was devised as a concept record rooted in the idea of taking the listener on a road trip through the southern US, his tumultuous personal life began to bleed into the songs, in both mood and lyrical content.
“I couldn’t keep my emotions out of this record, as I was waking up to shit I’d kind of sat on my whole life,” he says. “I didn’t really have a choice, actually.”
Towards the end of the creative process, having connected and recorded with singers such as Miley Cyrus, Lykke Li and Alicia Keys, Ronson was asked by British DJ Rory Phillips about the sound of a collection that would come to be named Late Night Feelings. “I was just trying to explain the thing to my friend, and I was giving this very longwinded, boring explanation. I could see his eyes glazing over,” Ronson recalls. “He was like, ‘Oh, you mean ‘sad bangers’? I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s way better.’ ”
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Before November 10, 2014, Ronson’s life in music had already been plenty impressive. He was born in Britain but reared largely in New York City, and many nights of his early adulthood were spent spinning records in nightclubs where he developed a skill necessary for any successful DJ: a finely tuned understanding of the sounds, tempos and hooks that move the bodies and minds of those packed on to the dance floor.
After releasing debut album Here Comes the Fuzz in 2003, he racked up production and musical credits for artists such as Lily Allen, Christina Aguilera and rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard. It wasn’t until he produced Back in Black — the multi-million-selling second and final studio album by British soul singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse — that his production career began to soar, leading him to work with generation-defining artists such as Adele and Paul McCartney.
On November 10, 2014, though, Ronson’s reputation graduated from merely impressive to something approaching the sublime. That’s the day a song named Uptown Funk was released as the lead single from Uptown Special, his third album. Featuring vocals by American R&B artist Bruno Mars and an irresistible groove laid down by Mars’s fiery live band the Hooligans, the song quickly became one of the defining tracks of the decade.
Its music video, wherein a sunglass-clad Ronson sticks to the background while Mars and his sharply dressed bandmates hold the spotlight, has become the No 5 most-watched video in YouTube history, with more than 3.58 billion views.
In Australia, Uptown Funk is the highest accredited single since ARIA began tracking chart data in 1983, with 17 platinum certifications indicating sales or streaming equivalent units of 1.19 million copies, well ahead of its two nearest competitors: Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO (2011) and Closer by the Chainsmokers (2016), both of which have attained 15x platinum accreditations.
With the benefit of four years’ hindsight, did Ronson’s third album do what he hoped it would? “I think it did way beyond it, just because of the sheer force of Uptown Funk,” he says. “I went from being somebody who had respectable records and a respectable production career, but because of the f..kin’ genius and power of Bruno it just went. It was the first hit I had really in America; it gave me this platform and some recognition. I can put out a record like this current one and people sort of care because I’m coming off some momentum. I think if I hadn’t had momentum, Late Night Feelings would honestly be a kind of small, niche record, but we’ll see. I’m proud of Uptown Special as a record. And I love the fact, if I wanted to DJ weddings until I was 70 years old, to be the guy that plays Uptown Funk, I could probably eke out a living.”
That’s quite the image, and it’s not hard to picture plenty of other musicians coasting on that single commercial success for the rest of their lives. That isn’t quite how Ronson operates, but sticking with that nuptial scene: what’s it like to know you had a big part in creating a song that’s now associated with what is often the happiest day of people’s lives?
“It’s the best,” he says. “It’s the most amazing thing to think something that started as me, Jeff (Bhasker), Bruno and Phil (Lawrence) jamming in a room … I think the song feels quite joyous because even though it took us seven months to finish, and a lot of f..kin’ arguments and labour, tearing our hair out — the initial creation of it was just this joy of ‘I’m jamming with my f..king friends, we’re having a good time, and we’re playing the same bassline for four hours but nobody cares because we’re digging on each other.’
“Then to think where that started to become this wedding tune, or every time a friend of mine has a two-year-old kid, they tell me, ‘My kid loves Uptown Funk!’ — that’s such a wonderful thing,” he says. “And also, just as a DJ, you live for those songs: ‘What’s that one song I can reach in a crate and it’s going to bring the young kids, the grandparents, everybody together on this dance floor, right now?’ There’s Motown, there’s ABBA, maybe Blurred Lines — but to have a song like that is really f..kin’ cool as f..k.”
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Where Uptown Special featured a suite of male vocalists, from Mars on the lead single to Australian singer-songwriter Kevin Parker — best known by his alter ego Tame Impala — and American rapper Mystikal, all of the vocalists on Late Night Feelings are women, which the producer describes as more of a coincidence rather than a conscious decision.
“A lot of people come by the studio when you’re making a record, and getting into the zone of this ‘heartbreak record’, you kind of see who’s in that zone,” he says. “Who’s clicking with that muse of where you are? It just happened that it started with Ilsey (Juber), the songwriter, which led to Lykke coming in, and we did (title track) Late Night Feelings. Then I met (gospel singer) Yebba, who was such a special talent, she kind of knocked me over. Through Ilsey writing a little bit of Nothing Breaks Like a Heart, then her reaching out to Miley (Cyrus) — so before I even had 70 per cent of the record done, it was all female vocalists.”
Ask Ronson about his life in music and he’ll tell you the two are inseparable, as music has been his entire life, from boyhood to today. Yet, when asked about the most surprising discovery he has made during that life so far, his answer comes back to the personal revelations that fell like dominoes in recent years, from the summit of global success with Uptown Funk into working on Joanne, Villains and his own Late Night Feelings that emerged from the end of his marriage to French actress and singer Josephine de La Baume.
“I think the most (surprising thing) has maybe been just discovering that, as I’ve gotten more honest and open with myself emotionally, it’s fed into the music,” he says. “I’m sure they both play into each other. I think all my favourite music — or 90 per cent of it — has vulnerability and honesty in it. It’s weird that I never really demanded that of myself — until now.”
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IN THE KNOW
Born: September 4 1975, Notting Hill, London.
Studied: Sociology at Vassar College and music theory at New York University; did not complete either course.
Big break: Producing 2006’s Back in Black, the second and final studio album by Amy Winehouse, who died in 2011.
Awards: Seven Grammy Awards, two Brit Awards, one Golden Globe Award, one Academy Award and one APRA Music Award.
Career highlights: Writing and producing the global mega-hit Uptown Funk; producing Adele’s 2008 debut 19 as well as her 2015 self-titled third album; co-writing Shallow from the soundtrack for 2018 film A Star is Born; and producing two songs on Paul McCartney’s 2013 album New, including the title track.
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Late Night Feelings is out on Friday via Sony Music Australia.