How Mark Ronson escaped his funk
… And wrote an album that wears his heart on it’s sleeve
Mark ronson is feeling old. ‘I’m 44,’ he says, watching our team set up the photo shoot, ‘and I’m thinking, “Isn’t there a younger musicrelated person they could cover? Like Stormzy?”’
Ronson lives in LA now, ‘because it’s the epicentre of pop music,’ but insists that his lifestyle is anything but rock and roll. ‘I get out of the studio at midnight, and kind of go straight home.’
That is as may be, but Ronson is once again one of the most sought-after producers on the planet. In the past eight months alone he has picked up a Grammy for his song “Electricity” with Silk City, Dua Lipa and Diplo. He has won another Grammy, plus a Golden Globe and an Oscar, for “Shallow” from the film A Star Is Born. And he is responsible for the jacked-up, “Jolene”-style countrypop anthem “Nothing Breaks Like A Heart”, the hit
Miley Cyrus tune that everyone’s allowed to like.
These recent triumphs, however, were not a given – rather they are proof of music’s capriciousness and the endless possibility for rebirth.
With Amy Winehouse, Mark Ronson created a sound so popular that everyone copied it – which meant that everyone got sick of it, too. For a while, as the industry cashed in on the soul revival he’d ushered in, the phone didn’t ring: his producer friends, he says, got the calls for Adele instead. He was “fired” by The Gossip; he wrote a doomed anthem for Coca-cola (“God bless Katy B”). There was too much clubbing – and that peroxide hair. As the noughties faded into history, he says, he was thinking, “What am I doing and how am I going to get back to being relevant and anyone giving a shit?”
But fame, as Lisa Stansfield said, is like those paternoster lifts in East Germany: some people fall down the shaft and some people jump back in. In
2015, “Uptown Funk”, Ronson’s single with Bruno Mars, became the year’s biggest song, setting himself off on a new upwards trajectory. That run continues this month with Late Night Feelings, his new album of
“sad bangers”. He has found his muse again – if a divorce and a period “spinning out” over self-help books can be described as a muse.
In the ’80s, Ronson’s mother married Mick Jones of Foreigner, the man responsible for the saddest banger of them all, “I Want To Know What Love Is”. There are reports that the young Ronson was in therapy from the age of eight, in New York. ‘I was sent to a therapist during divorce proceedings, but not for long,’ he says, ‘and
I’ve done it more in the last three or four years. I find it helpful. I’m not constantly on speed dial to my therapist but I can get overwhelmed quite easily.’
After separating from his wife, actor Joséphine de La Baume, in 2018, he fell to much partying and to what he describes as ’70s behaviour – by which he means turning up to the studio at 3pm after a long lunch. He tried to record with Diplo (‘because, I thought I could get in on some of his EDM, Spotify thing’) and with
Kevin Parker from Tame Impala (‘because he’s the coolest living musician in the world’). But he found himself insecure: ‘As long as I was working with them, I didn’t have to fully apply myself.’
Ever the pragmatist, Ronson noticed the effect his misery was having on his songwriting. ‘When I had that overwhelming emotion, I could actually feel the connection between my hands and the piano,’ he says. ‘I knew I was going to get some more interesting chords as it came through. As much as it wasn’t the most pleasant thing to go through, there was a feeling that I might be able to get something good out of it musically.’
One of Ronson’s self-help books was called Getting
The Love You Want (Simon & Schuster; R216). ‘But
I’d be reading Eastern philosophy, too,’ he says, ‘about how you should have no attachments in this world. Depending on my mood, I’d read a self-help book to see how to have a brilliant connection. Then I’d flip over to the Eastern stuff.’
When Ronson picked up a Brit Award for his work with Amy Winehouse in 2008, he said that it felt like the ring from The Lord Of The Rings – the longer you hold on to it, the more you believe it’s yours. But a lot has changed in the role of the super producer. Songs are a land grab now, with a dozen writing credits per track. Kanye West is the ‘peak of generosity’ where that’s concerned, Ronson says, muttering at the floor. ‘If he’s writing a rhyme and wants a pop-culture reference, he gets his assistant on a laptop to google, “What’s that thing that Elon Musk invented?” And the guy that googles will get a sum. Personally, I wouldn’t say googling something gives you a songwriting credit.’
He still has a romanticised vision of what a producer does, which is backed up by Lykke Li, who appears on the new album and recently said, ‘His gentle spirit unlocks vocals, especially female ones.’ When I ask why he works so well with women, Ronson is worried about sounding dodgy – another sign of the times. ‘I was raised by essentially a single mother and I guess maybe I feel comfortable,’ he suggests. ‘I work well with female artists, and most of them have complicated lives and this intricate sense of emotion at their core.”
But producers have to live vicariously. ‘Late Night Feelings is my first honest record,’ he says. ‘You’re aware of being a cheerleader and a support system, because that’s your job. But I reached a point where I was exhausted with trying to make irrefutably ebullient music.’
“Uptown Funk” bought him another six years in the game, he reckons. ‘A medium-size hit gives you two or three years of getting phone calls to work on other records. A monster hit gives you five or six.’ By this reckoning, his grace period is nearly over – but he’s clearly gone into extra time. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘when the hit “runs out”, there’s always plan B. You can produce some top-tier European acts and move to Belgium.’
‘I work well with female artists. Most of them have complicated lives and this intricate sense of emotion’