In this first episode, Zoe Abelson interviews Mark Ronson, a prolific D.J. and producer, about his early club days in New York, how he created “Dance the Night” for the “Barbie” film and the drum machine that started it all.
In this first episode, Zoe Abelson interviews Mark Ronson, a prolific D.J. and producer, about his early club days in New York, how he created “Dance the Night” for the “Barbie” film and the drum machine that started it all.
Zoe [00:00:11] Welcome to The Remasters, a new podcast from Audemars Piguet, interviewing today's leading creatives about how they take inspiration from vintage items to create groundbreaking work. I'm Zoe Abelson, a luxury watch dealer based in New York. I've dedicated my career to the pursuit of the perfect watch and finding that holy grail of beautiful design, respect for heritage and mechanical movements. Just like Audemars Piguet. I love the idea of looking to the future while taking something classic from the past and giving it a contemporary twist. Over the next three episodes, you'll hear from creatives across music, fashion and watches about how they remaster vintage to inspire a disruptive way forward. I've spent my career working with watches, but music has always been a huge part of my life. Both my dad and my brother were D.J.s, and my family was always hypercompetitive over who found the best new music. So, when it comes to music, there’s no better person to start the series with than Mark Ronson, a prolific producer and D.J., known for his records with an old school sound, sometimes infused with samples or even full-on reworkings of existing songs. I'm so excited to ask Mark about how he strikes a balance of creating something that sounds classic yet new at the same time, where he looks for inspiration and the vintage object that started it all. Hi, Mark.
Mark [00:01:56] Hi, how are you doing?
Zoe [00:01:57] I'm good, how are you?
Mark [00:01:58] Good. Thank you for having me.
Zoe [00:02:00] Thank you. Let's start by talking about a vintage item that's inspired your creative path. Does anything spring to mind?
Mark [00:02:07] I think that when I picture my studio, it's just old vintage things hanging around the wall, and then modern instruments and computers. But there's something about analog gear, vintage instruments—they have a history, they have a soul. But the one specific piece that I really started with was an Akai MPC 3000 drum machine and sampler, because when I started off producing 25 years ago, I didn't know anything about tape machines and recording and all the things that I sort of know now. I just knew that producing meant making a beat, and that's what this machine did. It was a sampler, drum machine, sequencer that was used by all my heroes, which was like Q-Tip and the RZA from Wu-Tang and, and people like that. So that is the first piece of machinery that I got that was obviously not vintage at the time, but now I still have it with me because we have history together. I love the sound of it. It's a beautiful machine.
Zoe [00:03:06] So you still use it today?
Mark [00:03:07] I do, yeah.
Zoe [00:03:08] It still functions perfectly.
Mark [00:03:10] It still functions. It's crazy because really what you're doing is. on it, you could do 800 times faster on a modern machine, but there's still things, there's still idiosyncrasies in these older machines. The way that they make the drums in the samples sound kind of crusty and the way that they, they have their own groove to them and their own feel. And you see, even when they make a newer version of these machines, they'll be like a mode. But now it's just sort of like, you know, it's a digital mode that you can click on if you want to recreate the sound of this older machine. Like, there's all these things to try and, with the newer gear to try and recreate the older ones, but they just, they have something about them.
Zoe [00:03:49] Because it's a longer process, do you almost like the routine a bit better than just doing it quickly?
Mark [00:03:54] I do, it's actually—this is getting really in the weeds, but now when you're editing samples and all these kinds of things, you're usually doing it on a computer and a program. We have these LED screens now. You can do everything. You can see the sample, you can truncate it. This was even before that. So you would have to actually edit the sample in milliseconds, like by taking the time and just trial and error, trial and error, trying to edit this tiny snare drum sample. So when I do it, there's this muscle memory thing that happens because it's a, it's a jog wheel that you're spinning to make the numbers go up and down. And I just go on it and it's like the one thing that when someone sees me on it, I look like an old, like stenographer from like the ’40s. It's just like [makes repetitive mechanical noise]. Like I just, that's, I just—25 years of doing this one thing. It's almost like a meditative thing working on this machine for me, because I just got so into the flow or whatever it is.
Zoe [00:04:48] I love that. As someone known for throwing popular nights in New York City in the ’90s, how has remixing vintage sounds inspired you as a D.J. earlier in your career?
Mark [00:04:58] Before they had what came to be known as mashups, which is like taking an a cappella from an Eminem song and putting it over Depeche Mode, you know, these sort of slightly eccentric remixes, right? Unexpected remixes. I mean, D.J.s have been doing that since the beginning of D.J.ing, you know, mixing an a cappella over an instrumental. And then, you know, they were called blends. But I guess when you take an a cappella and put it over an instrumental of something a little bit more unexpected, like putting a biggie a cappella over an AC/DC record or something like that, that was almost like the precursor to mashups in a way. And I guess when I started out D.J.ing in clubs in New York, I was mainly D.J.ing in clubs where they only played hip-hop and R&B and reggae. You know, after four or five years of doing this, I was wanting to experiment with other things. You know, I grew up playing guitar. I grew up loving rock music as well. And I heard AC/DC one night in like a rock ’n’ roll club, and it just sounded so huge to me. “Back in Black”—I was like, I wonder if I can play that in my clubs? Like, I wonder what would happen if I tried to throw that on in a hip-hop club? Would someone throw a bottle at the booth? Like I just started to become fixated on this thing over the course of the week and practicing this routine at home to put this boogie song and mix it with this AC/DC song. And yeah, and I would, I did that. I remember the first time in the club, and I remember just as I was about to do it, about to be like, this is either going to be like the worst thing that's ever happened to my career or it's going to be kind of amazing, or who knows? And I threw it on at this packed club called Cheetah on a Monday night, which was the biggest sort of hip-hop club downtown at that moment. And it totally worked. And it was this wonderful moment, and it sort of, from there, it gave me a little bit more freedom to experiment in what I was D.J.ing. But this idea of experimenting with sounds and genre and songs was always something that totally fascinated me, like all the way up until I did my “Version” album in the early 2000s or late 2000s. So it was like doing breakbeaty, James Brown inspired arrangements of songs by Radiohead and the Smiths and stuff like that.
Zoe [00:07:09] So you mentioned sampling earlier. Some people may say that sampling can devalue the creativity of an artist. What do you think about that? Do you think the same notion translates to other artistic mediums that take inspiration from the past?
Mark [00:07:24] I think sampling, you know, certainly when hip-hop became heavily about sampling in the late ’80s and ’90s, there was this argument: Sampling’s unoriginal, you know, they’re just taking old music, which, of course, I don't agree with because so much of that music from A Tribe Called Quest and DJ Premier, all of the productions that he did, they were so exciting to me. And not only did they take sampling and use it as this really ingenious sort of tool, they weren't just taking like an entire passage from a song and then just putting a rap over it. They were chopping up these tiny bits and rearranging them and putting them over their own drums and their own syncopation, and it was so exciting. And not only did it create its own great art, it made me go back and want to discover Ahmad Jamal and Roy Ayres and all these old artists from the ’70s and ’60s who I never would have known about and, to be honest, probably not cared about if it hadn't been in it. So sampling, I think, is incredible because it, not only does it create great art for the present, but it actually makes you care about the past, in a way. An entire generation of people from my age on down only know these certain songs because they were sampled. And now you have huge Instagram accounts like #sampledsongs and WhoSampled, the website, and all these kinds of stuff. So I think it's so cool the way it teaches people about the past. And you know, we're all, to some degree, ah, the product of our influences. So whether that's a visual artist, a watchmaker, a songwriter, a composer, there's no way that you're not somehow ingesting some of the things that came before you.
Zoe [00:09:06] Something that freaks me out is when there are new remixes or sampling of songs that I loved that were new when I was younger, thinking, oh wow, now it's time that people are remixing those songs. Like, was it so long ago? It's kind of, it's kind of crazy.
Mark [00:09:22] No, it's true. There was, there was an Armani White record like two years ago that sampled a song by Noori, produced by Pharrell [Williams], called “Nothing.” Yeah, it's an older song. It's like 20 years old, but it's still like in my era of D.J.ing clubs. And when those ones started to come back, I think his next single was a sample of like, a Lil’ Bow Wow song. So, like all these things that don't feel that far in my rearview mirror. But I remember, you know, when I was starting off D.J.ing, when I was 18, 19, I was playing songs that were sampled by James Brown and disco artists in the late ’70s that were, you know, the same amount of time had lagged to those, and I thought those sounded so exciting and fresh, because I didn't know those old records. But I'm sure the older guys were 10 years older than me like thinking like, Oh yeah, I remember that. Now. It's it is pretty crazy to see the—and I think the cycle, because it's just the modern era, is even getting shorter and shorter of like, of how long it's before, it's essentially like okay to take something again.
Zoe [00:10:24] When you say you take inspiration from the past. I'd love to hear more about the process when it comes to recording. Where does it start for you? Do you hear a retro sound that you want to play with, or do you have a song in mind that you try to retroactively rebuild?
Mark [00:10:40] I think that um, sometimes I can hear, I'll hear an old drum break, like the sound of just an old two bars of a drummer playing some great beat, and that will just inspire me to start a song. Sometimes it could just be something as simple as a snare drum, or a bass drum from an old vintage drum machine, like a LinnDrum, which is the one that Prince used. I think Sound and Sonic, and especially those with a bit of history, really, does really stir me. And then occasionally, yeah, I'll hear a great song and just be like, Oh man, it would be so great to have something that captures the spirit of that thing.
Zoe [00:11:18] You want to put out something that makes people feel the way that you felt while listening to it.
Mark [00:11:22] Yes, and in some ways as well, songs from the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s. There was, especially in the ’70s, I think, of Stevie Wonder and “Songs in the Key of Life” and that, all those records, they were essentially pop records. I mean, they were soulful, but they were pop records in a way that they were massive to everybody, but they had such a harmonic richness to them and the orchestration of it and the, the instruments in it. There's a lushness in it that just, I don't know why it appeals to me. And I always try and, even with a song like “Dance the Night” from “Barbie,” like it's a pop song, but the way that the strings and the horns in the orchestra work with what the guitars and the bass are doing, like, I'm always maybe trying to reach for some of that slightly more lush, layered feeling of some of those older records.
Zoe [00:12:13] You've said that recording to tape has a completely different sound than recording digitally. “Late Night Feelings” was recorded on an eight-track cartridge. Can you describe what a different format brings to the sound?
Mark [00:12:25] Well, recording to tape is what people did, really, in the very beginning of recording and the way that it captures sound, iIt has a warmth and a natural compression, and there's something in the voodoo of all the instruments going to the same piece of tape that, it just does something for me. It gels the sound. Recording digitally is also great, and it enables you to record hundreds of hundreds of tracks, and you can have all these plugins to sort of recreate the warmth of tape. But I do love recording. It's something that I discovered when I met the Dap-Kings when we were working on “Back to Black.” I never understood how, listening to their records, how they got this really just genuine, crunchy, vintage sound, and I realized it was because they recorded to tape. But at that point I knew nothing about that. I just knew my little drumm machine. So, yes, with certain things, it's great to record to tape. And then with “Late Night Feelings,” we didn't record it to eighttrack, but we did a run, a special edition of pressing them up on eight-track because I'm completely fascinated with all these different formats and why they sound great, and even the ones that sound bad and why those ones sound bad. And I think that vinyl, cassette, eight-track, MP3, they all have their own, um, things that are good and bad. You know, for a, if I'm working on a new hip-hop record or a track, I would do that digitally, because I want that to bang into sound as loud and as sharp as a Metro Boomin record might. So it's just whatever the kind of song really calls for.
Zoe [00:14:01] How do you merge the two formats, digital and analog?
Mark [00:14:05] Because I'm all for the warmth and the soul of analog recording, but then also the convenience and the speed of digital, what we'll do is, we'll record all the instruments, like drums and bass and the things that we want to sound especially warm, onto the tape. And then we just transfer them into the computer, and then we can edit digitally and add all the other things on. So we have all these tools at our disposal. It just makes sense to use all of them.
Zoe [00:14:33] I'm really interested in how musicians listen to music. How do you listen to music? What elements do you notice first?
Mark [00:14:42] I usually notice the drums first, I think because drums were my first instrument and my first piece of equipment being the MPC drum machine and cutting up samples. I always notice, I think the snare drum of a song is the first thing I notice, but I mean, to be honest, if it's like Adele or Aretha Franklin, then it's, it might be the voice or the vocal performance. It really varies. It is hard for me to have, probably at this point, a passive listening experience. I can't have anything, even the song playing on the background in the Uber, it's like a kind of, like, Can you turn that up? Even if I don't like it, I just need to stay ingest everything going on. When I'm listening to music at home, I just have a turntable and speakers, and it's not because I'm some kind of crazy analog purist. I just like the fact that when I'm at home, I'm putting something on to play for 25 minutes, or however long the side of a record is, without constantly changing the tune or going over or skipping or shuffling. It's just something about, I like having that music wash over me without constantly going back to my phone every three minutes.
Zoe [00:15:50] Pure enjoyment.
Mark [00:15:51] Yes. Yeah, I do also think it sounds great, and there is something very, almost ceremonial about putting a record on, you’re sort of like placing it on you're moving the needle over, you're dropping the needle. You've decided, I'm going to let this play for however long it is. And whether I like every song as much as that one, I think that's a very playlist mentality. And it's not necessarily a bad one, but this idea that, like every song has to be your favorite song of all time—the records weren't made like that.
Zoe [00:16:21] Going back to producing, how do you find that balance of creating something that sounds classic but new at the same time?
Mark [00:16:30] I think that has a lot to do with the combinations of technology and recording that we were talking about. I think a lot of the time I'm striving to make something that has elements of things that I love and that I grew up on in the arrangement, and the idea of this harmonic richness in the arrangement and different instruments. But then, you know, I'm a D.J., so I want, I want it to bang in the clubs. So I want to make sure that the kick drums there, the 808s, like, all those things are hitting hard, and that's usually from digital, whether that's Pro Tools, FruityLoops, Ableton, whatever your softwares are that have all the plugins that make sure that the drums are just, like, smashing. Yeah, I think it's always a balance. I'm sure I don't achieve it every time, and it's not something I'm, when I actually sit down in the studio, go, Okay, today I'm going to make something that I hope sounds classic, but also of its time. It's just, the classic is probably just in me because those are my influences, and I probably have to maybe work harder to make it feel of its time than I do even to make it sound classic.
Zoe [00:17:37] Do you think that more modern music tends to have that bang that would hit in a club?
Mark [00:17:42] Yes, because modern music, it's almost like an arms race to see whose track is louder, whose drums will hit harder. That's almost what we like about producers at this point, you know, like who's got like the craziest 808, who has the loudest clap? Because we're all listening mostly for the first time to music on our phones. So the person whose thing sounds the loudest coming out of that phone when everybody's phone is on 10 is probably going to sound the most impressive. But then, in other ways, a song like “Off the Wall,” produced by Quincy Jones in 1979, is not anywhere near as loud. But nothing's going to sound better in the club that night, either. So there's a balance, you know. I guess the most important thing for a D.J. is, what's going to make people dance the most, not what's going to essentially be the loudest. So that's the balance.
Zoe [00:18:41] That makes sense. It's more about the feel in the moment. And speaking of 808s, you were using drum machines early in your D.J. career, and in most of your projects you've used a vintage synthesizer. Looking back at your career so far, what have these objects meant to you?
Mark [00:18:57] They're there to give you inspiration. So the sound of a Yamaha CS-80 or a Roland HS-60 and other synthesizers that I love using, or a Moog, they just all have this very special thing that they do because these really brilliant people who invented them made it that way. And then they made it so that you could then fine-tune it to give it your own sound. So, you know, there's all these brilliant presets and things in these keyboards, but then you're there to kind of tweak these knobs and do stuff until you've given it your own thing, or you found the sound that suits the piece of music that you're working on. So, yeah, these vintage synthesizers and, and instruments, it sounds so cheesy, but they're my best friends. When I'm recording them, I actually think of them as like, they're my partners in the process.
Zoe [00:19:48] Speaking of influences, where do you find inspiration for your music?
Mark [00:19:52] I mean, really, it's just like an unlimited range of things. It could be walking to the studio and hearing a sound or, like I said, sampling a, a break off an old record or, you know, in the case of the songs that we did for “Barbie,” the script was so inspiring, you know. As soon as I read the script, it was so funny and rich and sort of full of emotion that the songs started coming as soon as we put the script down. It's nice to have that, too, because, I mean, I don't know how many songs I've worked on at this point, but it's a lot. But you're going to the studio and you're trying to, What's the emotion today? Like, what am I channeling? What can, how can I at least try and say something I haven't said before? And, you know, there's only so many human emotions and only so many different ways to describe them. So when you get a script or a story or something like that, that's so inspiring, it is almost like a gift.
Zoe [00:20:47] Where's the weirdest place you’ve found inspiration for your music?
Mark [00:20:50] The weirdest place? Well, one time I did this ah, TV show exploring sound and recording techniques, and we went to the largest manmade, reverberant space in the world, it's underground in Scotland, which was originally created to keep oil during the war to get the ships. So I think it's the length of three football fields? If you shoot a, say, a starter pistol in there, the sound will reverberate for about three minutes. Like that's how big and reverberant the space is. So I went down there to test it out, and I took a bunch of instruments and a drum machine and some speakers, and you suddenly realize, Oh God, like, any sound that's like a bit too fast or hectic, it sounds horrible in here because it's just, everything’s still reverberating around. And what sounded really nice was long chords and everything had to sort of be in the same key, because if you switch keys, the thing you were playing two minutes ago is still resonating around. So that was a very interesting thing. I'm not sure if we made anything that I thought, I don't know if it was the greatest song I ever made, but it was certainly, it was inspiring to be there.
Zoe [00:22:07] That's very cool. So, no one in my family is a musician, but growing up, we all bonded over music, that was like a very common thread and of an interest. And some of my earliest memories are driving around in my dad's vintage convertible in the summer and listening to ’60s rock bands, and my mom, who is like a Studio 54 lover, roller-skater at the Roxy, she used to dance in our living room listening to disco, when she didn't think anyone was home or watching. And it was something that definitely has probably transpired into my interest in music today. Was there any music that got passed down to you, perhaps from your family, that shaped your taste in music?
Mark [00:22:50] Absolutely. My dad's taste in music really shaped me. He was growing up in, in England, in North London, in this like conservative-ish Jewish family, you know, he was obsessed with American R&B. He had these records that he was only allowed to play in his bedroom. You see all those old documentaries and stuff about the Beatles and how they would wait for the shipment to come in every week of the American, you know, R&B, Chuck Berry and all these things. And, and they couldn't wait to get it home, because they didn't have anything like that in England either at the time. So they appreciated it so much. So, yeah, my dad was fanatical about American R&B and soul. Growing up, he, you know, he'd play Sly and the Family Stone and, and Stax and all this great stuff. So I'm sure I got that love for soul, funk and R&B, that was just always playing around the house. And then my stepdad was also a huge influence. So he came into my life when I was eight years old, and he's an incredible musician and songwriter. And he had this band, Foreigner. He had this home studio in our house that he taught me how to use some of the gear, and he was really lovely and supportive and let me make my earliest little demos on this stuff. And, and then his influence was a slightly different, more like ’80s kind of synthesizer power ballad, “Rocky” probably thing.
Zoe [00:24:17] Do you have any of those old demos from when you were eight years old?
Mark [00:24:20] I don't have any of the old demos. I mean, maybe they're buried somewhere. I would love to find them. I remember a couple of the songs, and then a lot of the times I would just make cover versions of my favorite songs. So he had this old sequencer synthesizer called a Synclavier, which is three times the size of me probably when I was 11. It had like hundreds of buttons, and I once spent three days recreating Terence Trent D’Arby's “Wishing Well,” this song that I was obsessed with, to a T. And, I remember, like, when my parents’ friends would come over for, like, parties and I would drag them into the studio and be like, Hey, do you want to hear this thing that I did? And I would hit Start in this thing, or play with this drum machine and all these layers that I had, that I’d programmed, and they'd be like, Yeah, kid, it's “Wishing Well.” Yeah, great job. And I'd be like, Yeah, but but but I, I did it. No, it was very cool to have. He was just super supportive, encouraging, was like showing me how to use the gear. And it wasn't like, Don't touch this, this is my stuff. It was really—pushed me.
Zoe [00:25:26] That's beautiful. Do you think you need to have an understanding of the past and to really know music history in order to be a good producer?
Mark [00:25:35] I think you could be an amazing producer with your basic tool kit. Now people have, you know, you get a pack of your drum samples and maybe some other stuff. There's so many amazing creative producers around today that I listen to stuff, and I just go like, Wow, how'd they make that? And we are all some kind of encyclopedia of knowledge, because unless you grew up Amish or something and weren't allowed to listen to any music, there's no way that you're not somehow influenced. You don't have your favorite things. But no, I don't think it's necessary. And, you know, even when I was starting off, I was 18, 19. I probably knew less than half of the music I know now. I do think that in some ways, though, in the same way that if you were studying to be a lawyer, you would go to law school and study precedents in old legal cases. And if you were a classical composer, you would have studied Bach, and Bartok, and whoever, and everyone in between. I do think that it's, it gives you this tool kit. I think that it's never a bad thing to study and be aware of the past and to learn from it.
Zoe [00:26:40] You mentioned your second studio album earlier, “Version,” which was all covers. Why do you think artists and audiences are so drawn to covers of old music?
Mark [00:26:50] Yeah, you especially see it in this generation, because that's how a lot of artists today first get big, doing covers on TikTok or YouTube. I haven't even really thought about it like that until you just ask. It is crazy, right? We'd love to see somebody on YouTube doing this cover of this song that we like, as much as we love listening to the original. I think it has something to do with seeing somebody cover it. You think, Wow, that person can sing that song that I love, whether it's by Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran or whoever. I could probably do that, too. There's some kind of, just seeing somebody, usually alone with a guitar, singing a song. There's an instant vulnerability and something that you're drawn to about it. But, um, I just covered those songs, probably for a similar reason, actually. One of the most fun things about learning to play a song is, it's taking apart almost like the inside of a watch, like something that just seems, so, it's something that's beautiful, you know, like, How does that thing even work? And then you start to learn the chords and the change and how it modulates somewhere, and then you start to understand, Oh, by playing it. And then, for a moment, it's not like I'm playing guitar and suddenly I think I'm Jimmy Page or Led Zeppelin, but there's just this moment of, Oh, I can do that. Like, there's something that almost makes you feel as special, wonderful, as these people that we hold, these artists that we just, like, you know, hold on pedestals, while you're figuring out a song. And then, yeah, it's like seeing how a magic trick is made or the inside of a watch. I always think about it also, like I've played on Saturday Night Live a couple of times, and I grew up being so, such a fanatical, like, loved that show so much. And you're there and you realize you see the cameras and the sets moving and swooping around and you're like, Oh, that's how they go from one skit to another, because there's three stages in these things. So that's how I kind of think about when you're learning to play a song that you love, you're making it somewhat more relatable. And with my covers, there was another reason to it as well. Like, I love the music of Radiohead and the Smiths and all these bands, but I couldn't play them in my D.J. sets because I was mainly playing, you know, funk, hip-hop, soul. So I kept thinking, Well, I wonder if I could reimagine these songs in a way that I could play them for my crowd and they could still dance to it. So it's kind of a mixture of all those things.
Zoe [00:29:12] I think you just kind of said it, but how conscious are you of your listener when you're creating music, and do you think about who you're trying to speak to?
Mark [00:29:20] When I start a song, it's really going off a pure emotion or a spark. There's just whatever you're inspired by, whether you come in the studio or you just sit at a piano and start with a chord progression. And then, there is a phase at which I start to think about listening to it, and especially being quite hard on myself. Like, if I get to a line that feels like maybe it could be better, or there's a part of the song be like, Who the hell cares? Like a what? Who? Like at some point you do start to think, who am I writing for? Because you're trying to constantly refine and make it better. So you're, you're sort of essentially like trimming all the fat. There is a moment at which I start to think about the audience, and I learned that actually a lot of that when I was working with Bruno Mars, because he's such a clever songwriter and he's always thinking about hooks and secondary hooks, all these kinds of things you add on a song to make sure that, you know, you're giving the listener all this ear candy.
Zoe [00:30:17] We've talked a lot about vintage sounds. Are you inspired by vintage outside of music? For example, the watch you wear, how you decorate your home or how you dress?
Mark [00:30:28] Yes, I do think that in my daily life, vintage or timeless things, I'm definitely drawn to them. Probably more than super-modern things. So that goes for my favorite watches, my Royal Oak, and there's just something so incredibly timeless about it. I didn't even know anything about it, really. The first time I saw one, I just was, sort of fell in love with it, with the design. Yeah, I'm not like some kind of car fanatic, but certainly with records and stereo equipment and art and watches and those kinds of things. There's, yes, things that are vintage, they have a soul to me.
Zoe [00:31:08] Regarding your creative legacy, what would you like future artists to take from your work and use as something new?
Mark [00:31:15] Well, first off, I would be extremely flattered and psyched if any future artists, you know, were influenced or wanted to take something from my work. I mean, I think it could be, you know, we talked about the fact that people are sampling records, like hip-hop records and stuff that are only 10, 12 years old now. It's probably not long, if I'm lucky, before hearing one of my records sampled, which is kind of crazy, actually, to think that I really came up in this generation of, like, people who sample records. At some point I will be old enough, hopefully, to hear somebody sample something of mine, which will be, which I imagine it'll be kind of an amazing, sort of crazy, full-circle experience. I guess I'd be just grateful to have any influence on this next generation. Like I meet really young, really creative hotshot producers in their early 20s that are already making stuff that I sweat and I look up to. I'm like, Wow, I wonder how they made that? And some of these kids are, were 13 when “Uptown Funk” came out, they were seven when “Back to Black” came out. So obviously when they’re talking to me about those records, I don't know if they're listening to when they're seven or they discovered it from an older brother or a little bit later, but it's, I realize I'm at that age now where I have been making records long enough that people caught this when they were young. And it's a nice feeling to know that, you know, there's somebody who heard a record that you did and liked it enough or was influenced by it, but I'm sure this whole next generation is going to be making up their own sounds, paving their own way, and that's fine, too.
Zoe [00:32:46] I'd like to thank our guest, Mark Ronson. Mark notices everything, even the small details. It's all-consuming. I don't know how he actually gets anything done. His music knowledge is so impressive. And now I've actually got a new appreciation for vintage sounds and how they're made. Thank you for listening to The Remasters, brought to you by Audemars Piguet. Next time, we're exploring how the world of fashion is inspired by all things vintage. Hit the Follow button now so you don't miss new episodes. And remember, if you're looking for inspiration, start with the past.