Mark Ronson fiddles with the lead that connects his phone to the hotel room speaker. He presses play and rushes out, reappearing when the last notes die away. That’s really good, I tell him, because it is. The song he plays is the title track from his forthcoming album, Late Night Feelings, and it pulls off the old disco trick of sounding simultaneously euphoric and yearning. The track packs the kind of chorus – sung by Lykke Li – that you suspect is going to be inescapable for the rest of the year. He nods. “I think these are my best …” He trails off and rolls his eyes. “Well, of course I’m going to sit in front of you and say something like that.” Then he presses play on the phone and rushes out of the room again.
It’s certainly an unusual way to hear one of the most hotly anticipated pop albums of the year, a self-styled collection of “sad bangers” that is also home to Nothing Breaks Like a Heart, Ronson’s collaboration with Miley Cyrus that, the day I meet him, has taken up residence in the Top 10 everywhere from Belgium to Lebanon. But rushing in and out as if you can’t face being in the room while another person listens to your music is very Mark Ronson.
Famously a nice guy, he also has a reputation for making quite heavy weather of the business of being himself. The last time I met him was in 2015. His 2010 album, Record Collection, had sold “way less” than his 2007 breakthrough, Version, and he thought that he had “gone cold”. At that point, though, Uptown Funk was in the process of establishing itself as one of the biggest singles of the decade, and I arrived at his studio just as he took delivery of a celebratory bottle of champagne from his record company. “I sent that to myself to try and look good in front of a journalist,” he muttered when I mentioned it, before telling me that the stress of making the single had, at various junctures, made him faint, vomit and cause his hair to fall out. When he played Uptown Funk to his stepfather, Mick Jones of AOR titans Foreigner, Jones had innocently asked if the guitar was played by Nile Rodgers. “So, there you go,” he said. “I’ve finally made a record so good that people don’t think it’s me.”
Uptown Funk went on to win two Grammys and become not just one of the biggest-selling singles of the decade, but of all time: 20m copies and counting. The accompanying album, Uptown Special – which featured collaborations with everyone from Stevie Wonder to novelist Michael Chabon, who provided lyrics – broke him in the US, a country previously immune to the charms of his solo work. He formed Silk City with his friend and fellow producer Diplo – “when the kind of piano chord shit that I like hit his drums, it accidentally sounded like 80s or 90s piano house” – and their 2018 collaboration with Dua Lipa, Electricity, was another global hit.
He produced Lady Gaga’s album Joanne – the title track of which has just won a Grammy – and it is an LP that had the kind of influence on pop that his work on Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black did a decade ago. It sent other artists scuttling in a similarly stripped-back, rootsy, analogue direction: it was said that everything from Kesha’s Rainbow to Kylie Minogue’s Golden to Justin Timberlake’s Man of the Woods was inspired by it. In the middle of making that album, he co-wrote Shallow, a duet between Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper for the A Star Is Born soundtrack: another transatlantic No 1, it won two Grammys and a Golden Globe for best song, and is nominated in the same category at this weekend’s Oscars.
And yet Ronson is still self-deprecating to a fault. Today, his description of the making of Shallow involves giving so much credit to everybody else involved – Lady Gaga had the idea for the chorus and the lyrics “that made my hairs just stand up”; his regular collaborators, Andrew Wyatt and former Libertine Anthony Rossomando, came up with the guitar part and Cooper had the idea to make it a duet – that he makes it sound as if he just stood there and watched the rest of them getting on with it. To hear him tell it, every collaborator on Late Night Feelings had to be coaxed into getting involved, rather than clamouring to work with someone who currently appears to be a hit-making machine. “They probably thought I was some pop wheeler-dealer,” he shrugs when I raise an unconvinced eyebrow.
He says he didn’t feel any pressure as a result of Uptown Funk’s success because it was “an anomaly, it’s clearly something that’s only going to happen once in a lifetime”. But it’s worth noting that virtually all of Ronson’s successes seem weirdly anomalous. Who would have thought the second album by Amy Winehouse, one of a raft of vaguely jazzy and/or neo-soul female vocalists who were doing the rounds at the time, would go on to become a classic? Who could have predicted a cover of a mildly successful single by the Zutons in a 60s soul style would become one of the most deathless singles of its era? And despite his apparent dominance in modern pop, he says he feels out of step with the current climate, where “all your songs have to be under three minutes and 15 seconds because if people don’t listen to them all the way to the end they go into this ratio of ‘non-complete heard’, which sends your Spotify rating down” and songwriters are forced to churn out hits at short order.
“Everybody shows off about how quickly they write songs these days, because of the way pop music is made,” he says. “People are like: ‘Yeah man, we wrote that song in 30 minutes,’ and I feel like: ‘Yeah, and it fucking sounds like you wrote it in 30 minutes.’ There are things written in that time that are fucking brilliant – Amy wrote Back to Black in, like, 10 minutes – but a lot of the time I think the quality’s slipped to a point where it’s just OK, where I wouldn’t feel comfortable with doing that with my own music.”
Indeed, he wonders whether his most celebrated production work would have even been a hit in 2019. “Everything has to be produced so it sounds competitively as loud as possible coming out of an iPhone or as loud as possible when it comes out of a Spotify hits playlist; you have to make sure the kick drum and the guitar have the same loudness and presence all the way through the whole fucking song or you don’t stand a chance. It’s kind of crazy how you have to think about music now. I mean, Amy wouldn’t have let that shit happen for a second, which makes me think how Back to Black would have been received, or how it would have probably performed badly on Spotify playlists if it was released today.”
He says the making of Late Night Feelings was complex and “emotionally taxing”. He had started making an entirely different album when, during projects with Diplo, SZA and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, he had a crisis of confidence in the studio. “Kevin is so talented it’s almost intimidating to be in the studio with him, so I defer to him a lot. Diplo has his own school of working where there’s a bunch of kids on laptops, and I was starting to become one of those guys just standing over people going: ‘Yeah, why don’t we try turning the hi-hat up.’ That’s not who I am – I was starting to lose my imprint on the music I was making. But I think it suited where I was emotionally and what I was able to handle.”
He couldn’t handle much because his marriage to the French model and actor Joséphine de La Baume collapsed in 2017. “I was floundering,” he says. “I was drinking too much and just giving orders over the backs of people’s shoulders and shit. So I got into a new studio in LA and I basically told the engineer: ‘Show me how all this shit works and take the month off.’ I went back to doing what I usually do, being by myself in the studio. If it doesn’t start with me, if that’s not the ground floor, then it’s not my record.”
He ended up scrapping what he had done and writing new songs, inspired by his divorce, aided by a team of collaborators who, coincidentally, were “all kind of going through their own breakups around the same time, so I don’t know if that was subconsciously why we found each other”, including Lykke Li, and King Princess, the hotly tipped singer-songwriter signed to Ronson’s label, Zelig. “My stuff normally comes from the groove and an interesting bassline, but anything that just had a groove and a bassline but not the kind of sadness to it, it just fell by the wayside. You know I said to you last time that I’d made something good enough that people didn’t believe that it’s me? I feel like this time, I’ve made something so emotional that people don’t believe it’s me. They’re just better songs. I love the last record, I don’t disown any of it, but there was a science-project aspect to it, getting Michael Chabon to write clever lyrics that I’m not capable of. This is a personal record.”
He’s keen to stress that the results are not exclusively concerned with divorce and heartbreak: the title is meant to evoke not merely small-hours misery, but “anything that keeps you up at night, whether it’s sadness or lust, or angst, or fucking Brexit, or the Kavanaugh hearing or whatever”.
The album’s “sad bangers” concept has already begat a clubnight, Club Heartbreak, designed, smiles Ronson, for “people who want that tears-on-the-dancefloor thing: anything from Only Love Can Break Your Heart by St Etienne to Go! by Common, to No Tears Left to Cry by Ariana Grande.” He is thinking of touring the album that way – “taking a giant mirrorball in the shape of a broken heart out and putting it in the middle of the room and just playing tunes” – and he’s currently working on Cyrus’s forthcoming album. Other than that, he says, he isn’t sure what the future holds, or even if he will make another album. “I still have a competitive drive, I don’t want to be out of the game yet, even if this album is the last one that I can play the game with. I don’t know. This feels like the last one right now, because this is the first time I’ve poured everything into a record. I don’t know what’s left.” He shrugs. “Maybe some other life experience might happen three years from now but … I do feel like the tank’s a little bit empty.”
This seems a very Mark Ronson-ish way to end an interview. “I know I can be self-deprecating,” he smiles. “We were talking about anomalies before. How many times can you have an anomaly before you go, well, OK, I must be good at something? I can’t just be lucking out every time, can I? I do feel like I’ve made something that has depth and emotion.”
And then normal service is resumed. “Those are things,” he says, “that I might not have expected myself from one of my records.”
