If anyone knows a thing or two about collaborating, it’s Mark Ronson. Working with everyone from Amy Winehouse to A$AP Rocky, Lily Allen to Actual Paul McCartney From The Beatles, he’s holed up today in London’s legendary Abbey Road studios recording with emerging artist DAP as part of the Converse Rubber Tracks global studio takeover. “There’s a lot of pressure with these things” he says of the session. “Going in the studio for the first time has a lot of the same things as like an awkward first date. The ‘getting to know you’ vibe or whatever it takes to build up enough trust to say you do or don’t like their ideas.” It helps, no doubt, that the venue has an air of magic about it, a permastream of Japanese tourists recreating that crossing outside, and a room that has recorded more people’s favourite songs than probably anywhere else in the world. Here are his…
The first music I made was…
Hip hop. Sampling old breaks. It’s all about the sound of the kick and snare. A bad guitar sound will be a dampener on a song, but a bad drum sound? Imagine a song like You Can’t Hurry Love by the Supremes. Now imagine a giant 80s gated, Phil Collins snare on it. It’s, like, totally wrong. And that’s kind of what I made a career on, I guess. Recording drums and having live musicians play them but not having it sound so organic that you can’t hear it in the club. With, like, Valerie or Locked Out of Heaven or Uptown Funk, it’s all live musicianship, because that’s what people did in the 60s and 70s. People made great records that you’d want to go out to and dance to. Now when people think of live drums or live instrumentation it either sounds like smooth jazz or just big rock ‘n’ roll things. I guess, Tame Impala and other producers like James Ford and stuff, there’s a lot of guys around today that get really good drum sounds – Danger Mouse, for example – but it’s definitely a dying art.
The record I always come back to is…
Talking Book by Stevie Wonder. It’s like a lot of things – like the Beatles – when you remember it in your head, it’s quite perfect and then you listen to it and you’re like, ‘oh, shit, it’s actually pretty rugged’. There’s like weird Moogs up here and it’s definitely mean, it’s definitely tough. But I think Stevie’s stuff especially because of the way all the synths and the Moogs and the pianos and clavs intertwine it’s very beautiful, melodic. And the way he played drums was more like a musician than a drummer.
My parents, you know, they kinda were like a little wild…
They had a lot of fun in the 70s. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and there’d be like a hundred people in the living room, music blasting and I would go down and stand in from of the speaker and whenever music was playing, I’d just air drum and have fun. It’s weird. I can’t actually remember what specific song was but I feel like my dad was just playing whatever, like, the good funk and soul and disco was of that era. So probably Sly and the Family Stone or Graham Central Station or something.
My earliest memories of buying music are…
Going to the corner shop where I lived before I moved to New York and buying 45s and enjoying them in the way that other kids might enjoy buying a comic book. The first album that I remember buying was probably Michael Jackson Thriller like everyone. The first 12″ I remember going out an spending my own money on was this one by a band called Sly Fox called Let’s Go All The Way. That’s when I’d already moved to New York.
I guess everybody listens to everything anyway nowadays….
I still love a lot of like heavy guitar shit. Like I still listen to At the Drive-In’s first record all the time. That’s such a great album.
My favourite chorus is…
God Only Knows. It’s the best written, most beautiful chord progression I can think of.
Actually…
God Only Knows would win the best verse ever. And then chorus would be I Believe (When I Fall In Love) by Stevie Wonder. I mean it could change if you ask me tomorrow.
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