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Mark Ronson Spills On Danimals’ ‘Versions’ & Winehouse’s ‘Back To Black’
By Groupie | February 8, 2010
Music projects funded by non-music brands have become regular news recently. You have Jean Paul Gaultier commissioning a Martin Solveig and Dragonette collaboration, there’s Franz Ferdinand creating a track for Dior, and more locally, we have Toohey’s Extra Dry’s ‘The Lab’ project rounding up Mark Ronson and his many merry men (Santigold, John Taylor from Duran Duran, Sean Lennon to name a few) to write and record with an Australian band of his choice.
As you probably know from our close coverage of the Ronson project here at Groupie, Sydney act Danimals were the lucky chosen ones to fly to New York for some serious jam sessions with the world’s best musos. While Mark Ronson has just announced that his own album will include the likes of Santigold, Scissor Sisters and Miike Snow, he was duly impressed by the input from the Australian upstarts in creating the song which will be used in future TED campaigns.
“I’m really into it. It doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever done before which I like,” says Ronson. “[Danimals] kind of pushed me in a way to go outside my creative box because they’re more experimental and stuff but I think the two aesthetics complemented each other really well.”
The project was a new experience for the Danimals, who had never been in a proper plush studio before, let alone had they worked with legends like Ronson and John Taylor. Ronson says it was a track penned with those two and Alex Greenwald from Phantom Planet which resulted in the final recording, “Basically what happened was each day for the first four days we wrote with different musicians. The song that we ended up using came out of a jam session with John Taylor from Duran Duran, Alex Greenwald and myself and the three guys who are here from Danimals.
“Santigold came in and we played her a few instrumentals of the tracks we had written through the course of the week and asked her which was her favourite and most inspired her to write lyrics or melody, and that was the one she was into. So that’s how the process worked. There was never a point where there were too many cooks in the kitchen or anything like that.”
Before we hung up on Mark, we had to ask just how he felt about consummating his early hip hop successes with massive breakthroughs on Amy Winehouse’s ‘Black To Black’ and 2007’s ‘Version’. Between winning a Brit for his solo album and producing the eight times platinum ‘Back to Black’, which meant more?
“I think they were both really different, “ he says. “‘Version’ was more of like a fun party record, I made that with no record deal in the beginning because I just wanted to have some different stuff to play out in my sets and I hated all the music that was coming out. I was like I’ll just make my own shit. My record was all cover versions, it’s fun, but it’s not the deepest thing in the world, whereas Amy ‘Back To Black’, all those songs and all the suffering torment and heartbreak that went into that, and all of that stuff that really bleeds into the music it’s a reach into the soul kind of thing. And so I guess Amy’s thing definitely has a bit more heft to it.”
While we’ll have to wait to hear the result of Ronson’s work with Danimals (March 14), the The Lab website has some of the best documentation of the process that goes into writing and recording music that we’ve seen as part of any music release, plus some insights into Mark Ronson and his world which are well worth seeing. Check it out here.
Groupie
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