A Quote by Mark Ronson
Then, you know, the other more-traditional role of the producer in, like, the kind of Quincy Jones sense is kind of part arranger. So you're coming up with, like, these - you hear these songs that are quite bare-bones, and you dream up what's the band doing? What's the rhythm section doing? What's the guitars, strings, pianos - that sort of thing. It's almost like a little toolbox.
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You know, rap is sort of like a form of talking, right? So it's like you can hear, you know, the slaves doing it. You can hear, like, you know, Africans and Jamaicans doing it just kind of as, like, a rhythmic, poetic conversation, you know, to a rhythm.
Almost all the producers I know and dig, like Quincy Jones or Brian Eno, are really musicians first. I'm a composer, an orchestrator, an arranger and a musician first. I know how to write and rewrite songs, and the genius is really in the rewriting.
Every time I've done comedy in, like, traditional comedy clubs, there's always these comedians that do really well with audiences but that the other comedians hate because they're just, you know, doing kind of cheap stuff like dancing around or doing, like, very kind of base sex humor a lot, and stuff like that.
So when I was working with Amy Winehouse on "Back To Black," you know, she had all these beautiful songs, incredibly well-written and just her on an acoustic, nylon-string guitar. And she'd play them for me, and then I would kind of drum up my idea of what I thought - make a demo with what I thought the drums should be doing, the guitars - like, quite a crude demo.
There's probably some buried conservative inside of me, coming out like a little gremlin in my belly that I've suppressed. This is a sort of character I've done before: He's kind of dumb and he's kind of arrogant, and a little seedy. A little coke-y. He's gotten into the cocaine or he's had too much coffee. It's been pretty fun. Not all the songs are like that but it sort of creeps in there.
My dream right now is - and I don't know how to do it, and I don't know if it will work exactly - but just this sort of vague aspiration to start some kind of website where people send in their stories or poems, and me or perhaps some other people turn that into music. And then by the end of the year we make a record and actually put it out. Like a band, but the band is actually a combination of the musician and the fan. I think that's a very 21st-century way of doing it.
I would love young girls to look up and see my string section or my brass section or the steel band and be like, 'Wow! I never thought I could do that, that's wicked! I want to be up there doing that.'
I really like writing music. That's kind of like my little hobby. I like that because sometimes you don't really have any control when you're an actor, over what you're doing next, and everything is kind of decided by other people. You're always waiting to hear from people.
I felt that, as time went on, an audience gets to know you and in a weird way, you kind of feel like you get to know the audience a little bit. When I'm doing stand-up gigs now, I feel like I'm doing gigs in front of people I know. I think that's the result of doing late-night shows for so long.
Well, it's kind of like that classic sort of trajectory in this kind of movie where there's conflict and they're estranged and they kind of grow to love each other but they don't show it. Then at the end - it's kind of like that. But I think the characters are more interesting than that.
When you're doing comedy constantly, you're organized: you know where everything is, you know how to get out of it, you know how to stretch it. But, like, doing 'SNL,' I stopped doing spots, and then I would finally do some sets - it take me so long to, kind of, get in the rhythm of it.
I've been doing four-track songs by myself since I was like a teenager, where I'd sing in a way that I ... I just didn't think other people would like it, so I didn't play it for them but eventually I got over that, which I'm happy that I did, because it's kind of a drag to be playing a kind of music that you don't really like as much as another kind.
The most inspiring drummer for me is Stewart Copeland from The Police. The Police are the first band I can remember really liking, and Copeland is a guy who was playing in sort of a rock band, or a rock-pop band, but he didn't want to do the traditional kind of rock drumbeat. He was doing all these kind of reggae rhythms, and the reggae style is almost an exact opposite of the rock mold of drumming.
I feel kind of like a kid absorbing everything. I just like seeing people who are doing their thing, whether it's music, or a movement they're creating, or coming up with new technology. I really like seeing that there's new stuff happening. I find that the most inspiring thing.
I think I write funny songs that make people kind of, like, stop what they're doing and be like, 'What did you say?' And then it makes them laugh a little bit.
I do notice that my songs fit all over the map, even in terms of the colloquialisms in them. The songs come out with their references intact, almost unheeded by me. It's like they existed somehow before they met me with their relationship to the tradition, and then they just end up coming through me at that moment because of my relationship to some certain kind of music that I've listened to in my life. I know that sounds a little bit woooey.
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