Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Mark Ronson

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

Mark Ronson is a record producer, DJ, and songwriter. Beginning his career in the mid-1990s as a DJ, he gained wide recognition in 2006 for his work with Amy Winehouse and Christina Aguilera, earning Producer of the Year for Winehouse’s Back to Black. Over his career, he has earned nine Grammy Awards, along with a Golden Globe and an Academy Award, for projects including “Uptown Funk” with Bruno Mars and “Shallow” from the A Star is Born soundtrack. Ronson has released five solo albums, formed the duo Silk City with Diplo, founded Zelig Records in 2018, and served as lead and executive producer of the Barbie movie soundtrack. His memoir, Night People, is a reflection on his life in music and the culture that shaped it, and it will be published on September 16, 2025. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Athletic Nicotine https://www.athleticnicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Tetragrammaton. I had spent my whole life living in New York, right? Making my record, being in clubs in New York. New York. You make a record here. You want people in New York to bump your shit. You want people to be into your shit in the place that you live. And it kind of didn't do that much in New York. And it suddenly started to do a lot in England. So obviously it was nice to have a place where they were digging the record. And then also it made me think like, okay, the fact that I spent the first eight years of my life in this country surely influenced my taste or did something more than I maybe absorbed before.

And then by going back to England and just being around there and DJing in clubs there, I met Lily Allen. And then I met someone who introduced me to Amy. So there was this feeling like, okay, sure, you like to go where people like your shit. But there was also more like I was just creatively inspired there. So after a couple years, I went back to England. And then eight years to England, I was suddenly flying to L.A. all the time to make records and I was like, I mean, just try and go to L.A. for a little bit. And I lived in L.A. for four years. Came back to New York. What motivated the move to New York from L.A.? There was this thing.

And it's a slightly cliched New York versus L.A. thing that I just was like, I'm not going to fall into all those mental traps. And it wasn't that. It was actually, I would just come back to New York for like a weekend. And I would just realize how much I missed it. And I felt like I felt like I'd almost It's been on a 15-year journey to somehow come back to New York. I felt like I went to London for 10 years, L.A. for five years. And I knew when I left L.A., I was like, I'm not going to be in the fucking thick of it. I'm not going to be where every writer and every musician, every pop star is five minutes away. In essence, I'm leaving work on the table.

But I'm going to go back where I feel the most native. So that's it. So I'm here. Cool. How would you say New York has changed? in your 15-year absence. What was it like when you left? What's it like now?

When I left, I probably left in 2008, 2009. And, you know, the people that were, I was making music within my studio, I think of even the rappers like Jay Cole and Wale and people early in their career. There was still very much the sense that L.A. was starting to take over, but New York was still a place for... relevant music, whatever the fuck you want to call it, hip-hop, pop, everything.

And then it did feel like there was a six or seven-year thing where it was like a little bit like tumbleweeds in a ghost town. Like I'm sure there were cool pockets of scenes going on in places I don't know about. Ridgewood, like shit was moving further out to Queens and Brooklyn. And then I've noticed over the past three or four years, it's really sort of coming back. I think, you know, there's always going to be that. cyclical thing. I think that there's very cool shit going on here. I think there's

Electric Lady, which for a while, it was like that studio compass point in the Bahamas. Like, if you're rich and you got a lot of money, you could go make a record in New York, like almost like a vacation destination. And now it's sort of come back. And, you know, that has a lot to do with the culture of Electric Lady and Jack Antonoff bringing records in and big pop stars. And now there's just cool shit going on. So I definitely noticed a little bit of a swing right now. Have you worked at Electric Lady? I have. Yeah, I've worked there a lot.

The very first record I ever made the first sort of major record I worked on was this girl, Nika Costa, and we did that electric lady. And that was when Electric Lady had fallen a little bit into disrepair. You know, like it was, DeAngelo was just bringing it back.

It had kind of, you know, it was this place that was once great that's fallen off a little. Yeah, and we went in there and it was mythical. I mean, A, this is my first time in the studio, I only knew how to use an MPC. You know, I didn't all this analog gear and all

this shit, I was like, because we were on, I don't know if you remember Dominic Chenier, who had that label, he managed the Angelo Dom. I do. Yeah, so he had his label with Nika Costa on it. Yeah, so we had Questlove and Pino Paladino

and James Poison, these amazing musicians, you know, like on this first record. I was 23 years old. So it's pretty crazy. But yeah, I've worked there and I've worked there a lot since. But now that I have my own spot, I just try to stay here. How did Dominic hire you to produce Nika if you hadn't produced anything significant before that? Well, I'd come up as a DJ. I played in bands in high school. And this is kind of what the book is about. It's just the 90s. So it's really just the very beginning is me playing in my high school band and then discovering Pete Rock

and C.L. Smooth and just being like, holy shit, this is what I want to do from now on. And so I listened to stretch arm shung on Babito and like that was like, but I had a very nominal knowledge of like hip-hop and DJing and I didn't know any DJs. So I got turntables, started DJing in clubs in New York, like just hole in the walls, bars.

I got lucky. I got a lucky break. got a gig at this club club USA but you know over the course of three or four years i got good at it and after a while of playing just hip-hop i started to think to myself like hmm i wonder if i could sneak back in black into my set you know because i would go to these other bars where they played rock and roll and the djs were not technically very good they were just kind of like you know they were getting fucked up in the booth they would play a song there'd be a minute of silence they'd throw on the next song but but people were just going bad

shits and like fucking dancing on sofas and going crazy and i'd grown up loving acdc but i you know i was so buried in hip-hop i hadn't thought about that kind of music for years and i just started to think like there was this big night at cheetah this this hip-hop club called cheetah on a monday night and like missy and janet jackson and alia and everybody went and uh I remember just thinking, like, I wonder if I could play ACDC a cheetah. Like, it could be like an absolute suicide mission, but fuck it, let me try. So I was like, what's my foolproof way to sneak it in, like this chosen horse? And at the minute, the song The Benjamin's was out, it was the biggest song of the moment.

And there was a rock and roll remix of it, which wasn't very good. It was like a little like probably like trying to cash in on. on a rap metal trend that was going on, but Grohl was playing drums on it. You know, that was like the saving grace. So I was like, all right, if I play the Benjamin's, I'll get the whole club and then I can switch into the rock remix on Biggie's verse.

And no one's gonna stop dancing because it's Biggie, right? And then right on the one, as you come out of Biggie verse, I'm gonna drop ACDC back in black and tried it. And it fucking worked and nobody could believe in. There's 500 people in Cheetah dancing to ACD back in black first being like, are we fucking damn? Oh shit, we're fucking dancing

to this. And so there was a little bit of a turning point, like in my career. Up to then, I'd been, you know, copying all the DJs I loved and people before me. Stretch, Clark Kent, whoever. And then I just started playing like rock and roll and fucking everything and Jane's

Addiction and Zeppelin and ACDC and, you know, whatever. So I started to become known for that. And I would DJ at clubs like life. And I remember seeing you there one time i think chris rock brought you down because that was a very big deal like i was like holy shit rick reuben because you know you weren't somebody that people saw out in clubs a lot and yeah in this VIP room at this club life on a friday night it would be crazy because my

dj booth was this shitty setup it was like literally like a mobile bar mitzvah dj set up just like a coffin shoved in the corner but i would see everybody come down the stairs and it would be this parade of like you, Chris Rock, Mariah, Prince, Jay-Z, whoever. And I would play that shit. I would play Rufus and Shaka Khan and ACDC. And so Dom came up to me one night and he had this amazing, very scratchy voice. And he was like, yo, I got this girl. You know, like shouting over the music.

I got this white chick. And, you know, I don't know what she's supposed to sound like, but the album, but I wanted to sound like what a good DJ sets. EPMD, Biggie, A-C-D-C, Rufus and Chaka Khan. I was like, okay. So that was literally how I got it. Like I got most of my early stuff, like a little De La Sol remix here or whatever

because I was the DJ and the cool clubs and maybe an A&R guy wanted to get on the list or whatever. So he would be like, hey, yeah, I'll give you this De La Soul remix. But it'd been in Dom's case, I got the Nika Costa gig because of the way that I DJed. Tell me about going to

electric lady for the first time working on Nika's album. You're not familiar with the equipment. Tell me about the experience. What was going on in your head? How long did it take to feel comfortable? High points and low points. Yeah. I really remember really, really vividly coming down the stairs for the first time. And like, I mean, it might be still the same the same legendary purple carpet that's there, but it's, it had been vacuumed in a while. And there was a really famous studio manager, Mary, who had been there since the 80s, and I came down, and I remember this coming down off 8th Street, coming down these stairs, the cat, fucking black cat runs right in front of it, and I hear this lady goes, oh, don't worry, that's Jimmy, like, hi, I'm Mary,

nice to meet you, and I'm like, I'm Mark, yeah, I'm here at Studio A or something, so she leads me into the room, and yeah, I just remember, like, it's fucking double doors open, and All that analog gear and everything. And, you know, when there's that much equipment in a room, too, there's a hum. You, like, get you going and you can, like, feel the hum and the warmth of it. And I had been in studios like that, probably a bunch with my stepdad when I was nine or ten. He was in foreign making records when he was in there. And I remember feeling very both excited and native.

I keep using that word. I've never used it before. but very at home in a place like that. And so, yes, you're right. I was very overwhelmed. Luckily, I co-produced Nika's album with her husband, Justin, who was older than me, and he was like a pretty well-established producer from Australia where he was from, so he knew all the analog gear.

But I also remember feeling intimidated. Like, I remember, like, he was running around, adjusting microphones over snares and all this shit, and Mike Prez, and, you know, we had made all the demos up to then on my Mackey 16 track where, you know, I'm the Lord of this domain. I at least know how everything works. And all of a sudden I felt they didn't sideline me, but I felt sidelined. I was like, okay, like, I don't really know how to do anything here. I was like in there, you know, we're recording Questlove, James Poyser, all these people. And I remember thinking, like, I feel a little like the triangle player in an orchestra.

Like, somehow I'm here, but I don't know how mandatory I am. Like, there's something about it. Like, yeah, I would chime in when there was a great take and that was it. And one thing I really remember, and I wrote about in the book, because the book kind of ends with the Nika record pretty much. But Questlove went out on a Tuesday because that's when albums used to come out. And he went to disco-roma on 8th Street, and he came back with a bunch of things. CDs and he had the new Fiona Apple album, When the Pond, and he put it in.

And the first shit just like blew us away in that crazy production at John Bryan with Chamberlains and the drums are so heavy and her vocals are incredible. And we were just stunned into silence. Like we were just and here we are in like the fucking second day we haven't even recorded a fucking kick drum yet and we were just left so depressed. Like we just all had to file out the room and couldn't come back to work for like an hour But then, you know, it started to go and they were taking the demos and the stuff that we have worked on and bringing it to life. But at the same time, I was a bit like, oh, like I love the fucked upness of the loops and the stuff.

And here we are replacing loops with incredible live drumming, but suddenly quite organic sounding. And then we found that middle ground anyway. But, you know, it was definitely both exciting and fucking, you know, intimidating. How different were the demos in terms of, were they all looped and sampled? Were they no players? The demos, all the drums were loops and samples, because that's all I knew. Like, that's, I collected breaks and I had my MPC, and then we played instruments on top of it. But then we had Questlove, who obviously knows how to play like a break.

Like, it's incredible. And it was to bring it to life in the fields, but it was at the time, you know, Lauren Hill, Miseducation was out. And it was just this benchmark of how to bring loops and these things together. And that's what I was sort of aiming for. And at first, I didn't know. Like, you're just hearing this here.

Like, it's so live. Like, what are we going to do? Like, it was my first time at the rodeo. I didn't think, like, okay, well, afterwards, we could fucking layer it with the loops or whatever. Was it the first time you worked with really great musicians? Yes, I think so, yeah. And what was that feeling of, like,

first time you got to be in the studio and watch Quest Love Play? It was incredible. I mean, I was intimidated as fuck by him, you know, because back then I was, like, really the first time. I was a fan of the roots, you know, when the first time you meet him as well, he's like, he used his words sparingly, you know? And I think, you know, he had his special drum booth that was like erected to, you know, make a really tight sound, this really closed-in thing.

And it was almost like, this is my fortress, don't fucking bother me. And it was almost like him and Pino from working on DeAngelo's voodoo. They had like a psychic, they would go to feel changes. And at one point, we had this like, this slow kind of mid-tempo rocky ballad. And they just went to this double-time drum and band. bass thing and like as soon as Questlove started to do it like Pino followed him and I was like this is incredible but at the same time you know it made me feel less like important or needed because my whole thing was like oh I just know how to run an MPC like that's my job

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vision. Athletic nicotine offers the lift you've been looking for. Learn more at athletic nicotine.com and experience next level performance with athletic nicotine. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. When you were in bands before becoming a DJ, what were the New York bands that were going on at the time? Who would have been the people that you would have gone out to see and maybe hope to go on tour with? We loved, because the band was like a mixture of black and white kids, and we loved 24-7 spies, living color,

follow for now, all that black rock coalition stuff. So we loved those bands. We played at Wetlands quite a bit, so we dug, you know, the jam bands too, like spin doctors and blues traveler and some of those other bands because they had like very tight rhythm sections and then we loved the roots that came a little later actually said and i think it was like the goats as well like because we would bring rappers on stage we were just trying to figure it all out to black crows lennie like that because that would kind of had this 70 swagger to

it that first black crow's record was like a big influence on a lot of the band and then like our drummer, listen to Morrissey. I was starting to love all this, the brand new heavies and Jamiracoy and all this English acid jazz funk stuff because it was very similar to the stuff that hip-hop sampled. There were these live bands playing old funk and soul. And Morris Bernstein, who's this guy who started Giant Step,

I used to sneak into the parties. I was like 15 or 16, and I ran up on him at one of his parties. And I was like, hey, you should let my band play. Like, you know, my band had the worst name. They were called the Whole Earth Mamas. And I ran up to Morris. His name is Maurice, but English people, of course, have to pronounce everything differently, Morris.

And I said, you should let us play. It's like, what's your band again? Like Mother Earth's Garden Bistro or something? I was like, Whole Earth Mamas. I was like, you should put us on the bill. And he was like, sorry, the bill's full. You know, they had like, Ed O.G and Pal Joey and Arrested Development, all these incredible bands.

And I was like, what if I get my friend Sean to play? And I didn't even know where it came from. I was so fucking, I was almost blown away by my own fucking guile. And he said, Sean, who? And I said, Sean Lennon, because Sean was my best friend. And I basically sold him out. I had an idea. I was like, maybe he'll help us get the gig.

Morris was like, all right, if you get him. I'll let you own the bill. So, yeah, so then I had to go to Sean, fucking tell him. Like, obviously, it's not, I sold you out to get this gig. I was like, hey, my band got this great gig, you know, you want to come jam with us? I think he knew something was off and whatever, but we got the gig. And I think Morris used the thing to, like, get MTV down, MTV News to come down. You know, Sean hadn't made his records yet.

So John Lennon and Son, everybody wanted to cover everything that he did. So, yeah, so that was probably our biggest gig. And then we were so not ready for that stage that it just kind of was our last gig, too. So watch what you lag yourself into. How did the idea for the book come? A couple of things that had it percolating in my mind. But there was really one catalyst. One of my best friends and DJ partners of the past 20 or 25 years passed away four years ago.

His name was Blue Jam. And they were throwing a party at this club in New York called LeBann, where he used to DJ all the time. And he was basically like the mascot spirit of the place. So even though he had already passed, they wanted to throw a party on his birthday. So they asked me to DJ. And it was just as COVID-as-any people were starting to party again.

And it felt like it was just going to be a lovely thing. And I was sitting in my little library where I have all my records at home, just looking around at all these records. because I hadn't DJed with vinyl in 20 years, but I just, I still kept my favorites. I'm just thinking about all these records looking at them, and I see like one spine that's just a green, Kelly Green spine on a 12 inch that instantly.

I'm like, oh, yeah, I remember, that's trends of culture. I bought it at Rocket Soul in 1994. Like, just how visceral the memories that came from just even looking at these objects. I don't want to make it sound like this book is some altruistic thing. is to remember all these fallen heroes

because it's a lot of things, but a lot of people were dying and I just started to think, man, I want to get some of these stories down that some of these people that I love in this time, before they go out of my brain, God knows I drank enough and partied and did drugs

and my brain's cloudy enough. These kids kept coming up to me too. Like a young kid would be like, yo, you were in New York in the 90s? Like, that must have been crazy. like, you know, I had fun in the 90s, but we were thinking about the 80s. We were thinking about the Roxy and Dan Ceteria. Every era has the era before it.

It romanticizes. But enough kids had kind of come up that I was like, yeah, there was something great about it. It was New York was this incredible spot as far as what was being made here. It was Biggie. It was Wu-Tang. It was J. It was L.L. It was tribe.

And they were in the clubs as well. And then you had Timbalin and Missy and Alia and Pharrell and Chad and even, you know, the most exciting people everywhere are coming to New York to make records and I would see them in the club all the time. I was DJing for them. And so I started to think that far more famous DJs than me have written books. But no one's really written the book that just talks about like what it's like to be a gicking DJ, not a superstar DJ, but that shit when you're just going to work four or five nights a week playing in bars. and clubs and dealing with regular people. And, you know, I don't want to over-dramatize it, the emotional highs and lows. But there are these things that are baked into it.

You're the most solitary figure in the most action-packed sort of like surroundings. And I wanted to, I don't know, talk about all that shit. So I decided to put this book in the 90s because I just like the idea of having like a very finite window. And I'm sure there are some people who are just like, wait, what? You wrote a book and there's like, no Amy? Like, what sense does that make? Like, I picked a period before I was really actually known or known outside of a very small scene in New York. But, you know, I wanted to keep it in that. And so it starts with clubbing in New York, going to raves as a kid, seeing a DJ for the first time live. And it ends with me walking around Soho with my daughter strapped to me and a baby

beyond seeing all these clubs buildings that are no longer yeah do you feel like the book documents your experience in the 90s or is it the experience of clubs in the 90s that's a very good and the key question I think that it is a memoir it is a mini memoir so if it's very much my experience emotionally But at the same time, you know, and I love a great oral history and Lizzie Goodman's meet me in the bathroom and can't stop, won't stop all these great hip-hop oral histories. I knew I wasn't doing that, but I did interview, I think I lost count, 150, maybe 200 people because I wanted to paint as much of the scene if you're reading this book that you still could get a sense of the 90s. So, you know, one night that I always remember is this party called Sweet Thing on a Tuesday that I did. And the first night Biggie came was obviously a fucking seismic event. And even the way that the club was shaped with this weird angle in corners, like, I barely saw him.

I could feel the energy like of the holy shit, Biggie's hit da-da-da-da, and the crowd ripple. And you knew that something was going on. But, you know, I remember at the end of that. the night big frank's party it was who's you know security a promoter all of it telling me like biggie rolling up with like 50 dudes from brooklyn like some of them had like guns swords like sending them all back to the car and and frank telling biggie like oh you know i can't let 50 dudes in right now and biggie just being like don't worry i'll stand here until each one gets in you just let in how you can, you balance them with the girls, and then I'll come in when it's all done,

and just standing there just hands over a knot of cash, like a wad like this thick and just like giving a bill each time someone comes in. And, you know, those kind of stories were like I wanted to make sure, because if it's not a memory that I remember viscerally, I feel like it's probably not going to translate that great on the page, but there were also amazing stories and anecdotes that I wanted to share and have in the book. So it's very much a snapshot of a very particular scene. It doesn't speak for much north of 14th Street either. It's this little downtown hip-hop scene,

this thing that was Stretch Armstrong and very much came out of the ethos of what you built. Like it's, you know, it had this downtown thing and what was cool about it, it had that mixture of hip-hop heads, fans, dancers, skateboard kids, artists, models whatever it was just that weird downtown cocktail of sort of what would have made the rocksy great or something what do you think makes a club great the best ones some of them were just a

fucking corridor with two speakers you know like the crowd is what makes the club great i think the crowd and the dj but you know of course there were incredible you know places like tunnel and limelight and Roxy and these places that were made to be these wild fun houses. But for me, my favorite places were always, 50% of them were basements. And I try to get into that in the book. I'm like, why was it the basement? There's something like going underground where you're just like, you're getting a little closer to like Satan's real estate.

Like, are you just aware, like, we're going down here? like being summoned for Dionysian Wright. And it's also that thing we're down here now, where we've all come to this place. We might as well be down here because it's going to take a little longer to get out. I don't know what the fuck it is. Yeah, there is something about basements feeling like

you could get trapped really easily. Yeah, yeah, you could get, exactly, you get trapped. There was this one club. I don't know if you ever went. David Lynch has this club. I don't know if it's still there. I had this club that he designed called Salencio. It was in Paris.

And you had to go so far down to get into this club. You just couldn't help but think like, Jesus, like, what if there's a fucking fire or something? Like, it felt like you were descending four floors underground. But once you were down there, it got naughty in there because it was just like, wow, we were down here. How does the energy of a club change over the course of the night? I wouldn't say, I don't know if it's what I miss, but what made me good back then, you would play six hours. You would really play 10 to 4, you know, maybe 11 to 4, and you were there to build the whole night. So, you know, there was this kind of New York regimen back in the day.

It's certainly different now, but you would play classics and funk and song, and then that would move into some more uptemper. disco and maybe some break beats if there were like break dances out on the floor and then you go to old school hip hop slick Rick EPMD somehow 1231 you would really try and save the new hip hop

like as long as you can like keeping them at the you know like at the gate like see how long you could really like tease the crowd before you suddenly drop Biggie DMXJ whatever it was and then you would play one to two new hip hop

then dance hall, then some new hip hop, some old school, and then maybe a little bit of house or some like classic sort of old school dance shit till the end. So it was amazing to get to architect that. You know, part of what happened later when you kind of, whether you become a big DJ or whatever it is, like you're just going on these festivals at this peak hour and you're going to play an hour set.

So I missed all that feeling of building the night. There's a great DJ in New York who's from my, era but I talk about him in the book a little his name is Ellie Escobar because he was kind of a bit of a unsung hero for the first 25 years of his career and then suddenly in the last five 10 years has just become like this New York nightlife icon but he'll still play that six-hour set cool because he loves that thing of playing the whole night and I've actually a friend of mine who read the book was like hey man yeah no i dig the book it just really sounds like you just miss playing vinyl again like that was his

takeaway from the book and he's somebody who's always come to me with a good creative idea and just like said it like it's kind of like gospel i think you need to just play vinyl now till the end of the year yeah and i remember thinking like that sounds like such a pain in the ass but also maybe incredible so that's what i've been doing it's just been playing vinyl again and you know it's Certainly, about 2007, after 2007, the selections get a little slim, but I just love it. And I'm going back, and I'm playing five, six-hour sets again. Amazing. There's all this 90s and 2000s hip-hop that when I'm playing off my computer drive or USBs,

even though I'm playing with turntables, they become almost not meaningless because they're still great songs, but it's one of 20,000 songs on a hard drive, three megabytes. It's sort of, it's click and drag, and it's there. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy, using one of Squarespace's best-in-class templates. With the built-in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins, and menus. So your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs. Discover unbreakable creativity with fluid engine, a highly intuitive drag-and-drop editor.

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Visit Squarespace.com slash Tetra and get started today. If you know you're only going to be playing vinyl, would you go to the extreme of having vinyl pressed for things you want to play that vinyl doesn't exist for? I think I would actually. I think that you can press 45s. There's this DJ, this Japanese DJ. of why I watch on Instagram because he just has these incredible things where he's just like

cutting 45s and it's just so exciting his his body language is so like swinging and just so like you know I always wish I had that body language as a DJ like sort of like gregarious and inviting I've always just been a bit like kind of just sweaty going through it throwing records every which way but he has all this new shit I know watching it I'm like oh there must be a way I think that there's like an affordable 45 pressing machine that you can like have in your crib maybe. But yeah, there would certainly be things. And I remember the first time I ever made a record

that I pressed up on acetate was the Nika Costa record like a feather. Because it was the first time I had ever made anything that I deemed worthy to play in the club. I was like, wow, let's see. so i remember going to sterling and just like watching the lathe for the first time like come down and you know obviously technically it's just making microscopic wiggles that amplitudes and volumes and whatever but like i was like this shit is sculpting music like this is incredible you know i remember playing it for the first time and then obviously

acetates you can only play them five or six times they wear it down you can't really back him a lot because you'll wear out the groove. I remember one of the main promotion guys from Bad Boy Records, his name was Henrock. I remember him one time coming also to that same Tuesday night party that Biggie came to and bringing me an acetate of Biggie hypnotized and saying, like, I got the new Biggie joint. I can't give it to you, like take it to flex, but like you could play it right now. And I just remember being like, holy shit, I don't even know if I had heard it yet. It was so crazy. I think there was this era where the first time you'd ever hear a song was in the club amongst because the DJ had it or whatever.

And I remember putting it on and just like handling it like a Ming vase or some shit and throwing it on and just release onbeat, whatever song I was playing it out of. And just because that song just came in so heavy too that bong, uh, with the kick drum and Biggie's fucking weird. wheeze. And the whole club, it was just one of those moments. Like, I remember there's five or six songs from that era. I remember dropping for the first time or dropping in a certain way and feeling molecules shift in the club. Like, there's something, molecular heat, energy that would just change. So, yeah, those acetates were very special. And I also remember walking past a brownstone in Chelsea one time and somebody had left all these

original pressing, first pressing, acetates outside that they must have not wanted anymore. It was all from the first brand newbie an album. And I remember meeting Dante Ross one time much later and was like, did you ever live on 21st Street? Like, I just had an inkling. They were his, that he must

have left out in the street. He was like, yeah. But I like the way that playing vinyl only it's just been a nice hard reset, you know? I miss some of the creativity of what you can do with Serrata, the way you can just make a cappella with a click of the thing and do mixes and use the bass line from a Jackson 5 song over a drumbeat from whatever.

But I just needed this hard reset at this moment, and it's been a lot of fun. Would you say it makes your DJ set very different? Yes. I noticed that, like, younger kids are just watching because I'm not doing some DJ Scratch crazy routine, but just cutting records, bringing them in on beat, taking them off, and maybe speed mixing,

you know, eight bars of this record into this one. They're just dumbstruck. They're just like haven't seen it before. And this is one of the things I think has gotten crazy about DJing, like with DJs being huge headliners. Like, DJs are not essentially performers, you know, like pushing a series of buttons. Listen, Steve Ayoki, there's people that are really,

good at it and it will bring this showmanship. But most of us you know, that's why there's 200 grand of LED lights and whatever the fuck else on stage and confetti cannons. But there is something with vinyl that's like at least

a little something to watch. The hands are doing something. There's a grace and a performance in it. And then the other thing was, I have to think so much before the gig about what I can bring tonight because I can't just show up with a laptop with the entire history of recorded music, right? And maybe 300 records if I really want to fucking do my back in that night.

So I'm carrying all these crates. So I have to think about what the crowd's going to be and what do I want this record and going through record. So I was sort of psychically bonded with this crowd before they've even got there. And it might be a totally different crowd that shows up than I'm imagined in my head. But I have a little bit of an idea. picturing that dance for and seeing what that might be. So I'm already like in some sort of flow.

I've already thought about the records. So and listen, doing that the past six months, it's so fucking crazy. Like, you know, all our schedules are full enough as it is. I'm like, not only do I have the DJ gig now,

but I have to fucking carve out an hour and a half before the gig to get my records together. Like, but it does make a difference and there's something about it. It's like the warm up. Also, to be honest, that was the time I was probably the best DJ. I have more knowledge of music now in the 90s when I was playing five nights a week. I knew my crowds. So there's probably something for me that's a little bit,

I'm performing and playing the record and doing it in the same way when I was sort of at my best. So I feel a little, I feel invincible, right? How different is the audience today than, it was in the 90s. The crowds are pretty much completely different. I'm playing for 93% different crowd. You know, there's some old heads that come out

and occasionally I'll play a party where it's like a little bit of an old-school crowd like that. But, you know, when I haven't played in a while, I have a few younger DJs that are dope that I text. Like, hey, what's popping? Like, what's the new shit? And these kids are just like, man, we're just playing year-in-a-m's 2000 set.

And I have that going on a little bit. in my production right now because I noticed that music is going back to this thing and kids are falling in love with those same drum sounds that we were doing in the 2000s, the kind of old school 60s breakbeat sound and all that

and maybe it never went away, but I noticed it's really back and kids are like yeah, no, do that shit. And it's not that I'm Tom York or square push or I'm so entirely progressive that I will never repeat myself. But in my head I'm like, really? Like, But I kind of did that.

Like I remember once doing a record with Duran Duran, who I really loved. They were one of my first favorite groups as a kid and, you know, still made great records. But I remember going in the studio with them. Maybe it was 15 years ago. And I was like, can we like get some of that? The Rio, the magic of Rio, the sequences, did it did it. 16th notes, disco hats, tough drums, nasty guitars and just great songs. funky bass signs, that thing.

And they were like, but we did that. And I remember, like, I remember thinking, yes, but, like, and it was this moment that the killers had just broken and Franz Ferdinand and all these English bands, the Kaiser Chiefs. I was like, but, like, all the coolest shit is just taking a lot of, like, what you did. Like, this is the cool shit right now. But I do remember them because they were, you know, they like to stay moving forward. And so now when I'm in the studio with, like, younger artists, you're like,

no, that shit was dope. Like, how you did that back. then, it's sort of still this push and pull. I'm like not wanting to repeat myself. And I guess the other thing is it's interesting to me when a 23-year-old reinvents it or takes some of the thing or some of those same concepts or ideals of what we were doing back then and puts it through their lens. When strictly through my lens, that's when it just becomes recycling. So with the DJing when the kids are like no no we're just playing like the 2000s

like set the year doing I'm like oh it's nice to hear because I love that music and it's fun to play but it's like it's super cool and like I watch like a young 23 year old DJ playing Norrie or whatever it else it is when I'm doing it do I just look like that old guy

who's just like kind of falling back on this same shit do you record all of your DJ sets I actually never record any them. Because I'm not on the mic, the mic is like when you hear those great old DJ set recordings and someone's on the mic and you can hear the crowd because of the bleed from the mic and it seems to me it's so ephemeral. There's something so in the moment about it. There are some,

like I played a set for A track recently and he recorded it. Also, the other thing is like when you're at fucking playing in the crowd, like I try to be as precise as possible. but you're in the moment and you're with the crowd and you might be dropping a record not offbeat but maybe not in the most kind of like, you know, the mix wouldn't be as exact

as if you were just making, sitting in the studio making a fucking blend tape. So it's almost like I don't want to hear it back, but he did record it because it was for the Fool's Gold, his label's anniversary, and I heard it back and I was like, oh, that's actually pretty good. Like, I don't really ever need to hear them again.

how long did it take you to put the book together it took me probably from start to finish it was about three years so I had to you know stop there were music projects here and there and we did the score and the music for the Barbie film which probably took over like nine months maybe a year of my life but I read Stephen king on writing I never studied writing in school so I read Stephen king's on writing and Mary cars the art of memoir. And I just love Stephen King's how austere his rules were like, lock yourself in a fucking basement and no windows and five hours a day and these kind of things.

And for the first year, I was in the basement of my place in New York until I realized, like, wait, this is actually a health hazard. Maybe I should just seal the windows off somewhere else because it's just like a damp fucking New York basement. with water damage everywhere, but I would try and write 8 to 1 or 8 to 2 and then take a break and then do whatever music stuff that I was working on.

But it really did take over and there was a time certainly in the second year of it where I was so turning down studio work and working on records to really focus on this. And I was aware that something was pulling me to this and there was a reason I needed to do it. At the same time, I was like, you know, I hadn't no idea if it was good, terrible. What the fuck? I'm like, is this now I'm in year two? Is this a total waste? And, you know, I was doing it at that point. I was so deep into it.

And then at the very end, I handed in the book to my editor January of this year. And he was like, great that my editor at the publishing house, Colin, who's a great editor and really helped me out a lot along the way. And I think in some ways he had seen the writing go from maybe being like a four to a seven and a half was just so happy we're like out the woods. But there was something that I just knew it wasn't done. I just was like, I don't feel like breaking out the champagne. This doesn't feel done to me. And that was already, you know, almost three years in.

And I showed it to my wife's cousin, who's a really incredible writer named Abe Streep. He wrote a book about a Native American basketball team. from Montana. It's just an incredible book and writes for New York or all this shit. Anyway, and he's around my age. He loves that era of hip hop and he said that he would read it. I was like, thanks so much. And he was like, I called him up. And the first thing he said was so there's a permanence to books. And I was like, oh God, here we go. Like he was trying to tell me like, this thing's going to be around forever. I think you could spend a little time and make it better. So he came on and really helped me.

as an editor for a little while and then he passed me to his editor the New Yorker. In the last three months of the book, I just spent in like an 18-hour-day self-imposed writing boot camp. And what was cool about having her is she made me put the kind of stuff that you

would expect from a New Yorker angle. Don't just say all Peter Gation's clubs closed. Tell me how Giuliani's fucking policies and his war on Clubland, how did that thing. And don't just We can't just be suddenly at Friday nights at life and it's bottle service. Like, let me know why the climates of New York clubs changed

and why it went from this pretty cool egalitarian place where everyone's hanging. There's no VIP rooms. And suddenly we're at this thing where it's like, you know, this total exclusive hierarchy of where people sit has become the most important thing. So I'm really grateful that that last couple months, like, brought the thing to the book listen the book's not perfect it's something that i need to get out for whatever reason and i wanted to tell a story of this time but uh where it got to because of that last intense three months um i can't imagine if the old book came out how has your relationship to

that time period changed from working on the book yeah i don't know if it's like uh if it's my midlife crisis but like it's funny like carrying these you know hundred pound crates of gig bags one in each hand to these gigs like lumbering upstairs again from basement clubs and actually two of my good friends from that from that era like been helping carry the records and there's definitely something about it it's just like we're literally just repeating like 30 years you could take a snapshot we look a little older but this looks like what we were doing 30 years ago. And there's something about it that's both sweet and like,

okay, we're just trying to relive some glory part of our youth. But I've been working on a record at the same time to go with this book. And the record, I don't want to be retro. I don't want it to be like sound like 90s stuff. But it has touches and some samples and some flips of things from that error. and honestly some most of the things that I'm flipping most kids today will have never heard anyway so it is you know hopefully something fresh so I think the club and the DJing is informing the music in a nice way that's just like I want the music to at least have the energy the way it moves I don't want to fall back on any of my like go-to easy drum patterns that I know work or what I've been doing the last 20 years I want to the shit to move in the way that the music of that time that I loved did. My ears are fucking battered.

Holy shit. Like, I forgot, like, I think you just regenerate so much better. Your cells and all that stuff when you're that age. So now the pounding of those booth monitors for three, four hours is no joke. And I've had to start wearing molds. But even that only really takes, what, like 10, 20 dBs. off and it's your skull vibrating that's like part of what the tinnitus is so it's yeah it's it's crazy like the past 20 years i've been rocking up to a place and playing my little fucking hour set i'm the

headliner but this is like back to four or five hours of this of this pounding thing and it's like yeah i've had to be really careful like it's that's also been a wake-up call like turning the monitors down wearing the ear plugs because my livelihood is now studio so I can't really just yeah yeah it sounds like these five-hour sets are putting you closer in touch with the spirit of music than the connection you've had over the last I don't know 15 years yes yes has to it does and and there's all these other records like if I'm DJing somewhere I play my like 90s segment of the set or 2000s you know it's this sort of speed mix of 20 songs snoop dray dmx

whatever fucking 20 minutes when i'm looking at 200 of those records 200 records of the 90s and the 2000 suddenly it's like oh how the hell did i forget about got it twisted by mob deep and fucking souls of mischief 93 till infinity it's like all these records that that i've forgot And the other night I played at this roadside bar fried chicken restaurant upstate in upstate New York where I have a place. And a friend of mine who threw Soul Kitchen with Frankie, he lives upstate and he opened this kind of cool fried chicken restaurant and this Twin Peaksie-looking diner. So I was up there and he just has two turntables and they have disco nights there. And so I was like, yeah, let me play. So I went and my opening song was, I think it was Papa Don't Take No Mess by James Brown into Golden Years by Bowie.

And just that feeling of like golden years, I think I had on a 45 because I just found it that day and like holding so delicately onto this 45, it's like spinning with the middle and like the slip mat spinning underneath it and you're just like cueing it exactly so you can drop it on beat because we all know like 45s are a little like harder to handle them. It's just much more exciting. Like you said, the spirit of music, the breadth of music is much wider of what I'm playing. I'm playing music that, honestly, I like a lot more than some of the shit I've been playing for a little while. And then what's also funny is to see, like, every generation of clubgoers has its own recurrent throwbacks, right? So like a song that wasn't even big to us when we were DJ in the 90s and 2000s is now cool unironically for like this generation's throwback. So, you know, there's things that, no offense, I'm not going to play Return of the Mac. It's just not something I'm going to play.

But the Ramon's Blitzkrieg pop is a huge record for like a sort of hip-hop party going downtown crowd. I'm still standing by Elton John. which is that that's an interesting one to me because also the beat is like it's not something it's sort of like an awkward way to dance like yeah like what else is big everybody wants to rule the world i feel like these are like stranger things records almost like loveful by the cardigans so it's like fun tracking these ones down on vinyl occasionally playing them trying them out and sometimes just be like nah that's okay L M.N.T. Element Electrolites. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? Do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best? Add element electrolytes to your daily routine. Perform better and sleep deeper.

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Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit Drink LMNT. dot com slash tetra and stay salty with element electrolytes L MNT How does disco fit into the picture?

Disco was Michael Jackson early prints like disco prints Cheryl Ling got to be real these were all like some of the cooler records and Sal Soul Orchestra

those were all parts of the New York canon when I started DJing, like everybody knew it. But it's funny to think when I started DJing in 92, 93, Michael Jackson's don't stop to you get enough was, what, 15 years old? Like, there are Drake records that are older than 15 years old now to play. Like, it's wild that that was like really throwbacky to play a Michael Jackson song. Also, the thing about New York clubs is, especially in the hip hop clubs, it was a little more, not snooty, but there was like an attitude. Like, you're not going to hear September by Earthwind and Fire. Like, you might hear Brazilian rhyme song. You're not going to hear Michael Jackson, don't stop to you get enough.

Like, these songs are kind of like wedding songs or whatever you want to call them. Now I noticed, especially like with like the DJ Eli Escobar that's talking, kids actually want to go out and hear songs. never heard before, which is like that blows my mind. And also I find incredibly scary because I'm like, well, wait, what does that mean? Like, does that mean like not to play any of the shit that I used to play? Like, is it ghost or like corny to play? You know, I'm not talking about wedding tunes, but even a disco song. So when I played the chicken restaurant, for lack of a better word, upstate, you know, I think it was like maybe fit 300 people. And there were like 300 people partying outside because they were piping the music outside and the age was like 18 to 60 so that's

another thing like now i have like people who like my music that are their 40s and 50s and they might be bringing their kids and you know there's this you're trying to find this balance and the thing that i'm that i talk about in the book too is that as a DJ the other thing that's definitely changed for how I play is like people come out and they expect to hear records that I made. Of course they do. They're going to see Mark Gronson. They're like, okay, we're going to hear Valerie. We're going to hear Uptown Funk. We're going to hear whatever it is. But for me, that almost feels like cheating or something. You know, like if I'm playing and I don't have them enough, I know I can throw on one of my records and those records are 10, 15 years old. So yeah, I talk about the

end of the book. It's like when I play Uptown Funk, you know, the crowd goes crazy. Bruno Mars is not standing next to me in the booth performing the song. You know, I think it's kind of amazing. It's like there's something psychological that happens in our brain. Like, why do people get more excited? Well, we know why. They're excited because they're dancing in front of the person who made it

and they're showing their appreciation. And I'm beyond grateful for all of it. I'm not paying lip service. Like, I'm so lucky that anybody gives a shit that is coming. but it always fascinates me that like the next DJ could literally get on and play Uptown Funk once I've left and everyone will clear the dance floor it's like you know there's all these bizarre things that happen in this psychic bond between the DJ and the crowd is the New York club scene the same as it's always been no and it's changed so much that I could

probably answer about 25% of this question you know like there's some shit in Manhattan but really all the fun shit is in Brooklyn for sure the clubs then there's like the knockdown center which is out in Queens you know there's like places to party the New York shit is New York is always going to have its little spots and it's going to have a vibe but it's like once a lot of cool people and artists so many people were priced out of New York like of course the cool parties were as well and there's no huge super clubs really to draw people in here most of that shit is in is in Brooklyn so yeah so it's been getting back out there's also like been about hooking into the right scenes and being like you know making sure and you know I played this

I played a club in New York last week and it was like it was corny like because it was just like that's who goes out in New York like it was like oh man I played the same set last week in Brooklyn and it was incredible so it's also been about like finding the right people to to make sure I'm hopping on the right gigs. Is the scene in Brooklyn as good as the scene in New York in the 90s, or are they still different? I think it's good. I think it feels very vibrant and alive.

I think there will always be something special about the 80s is incredible, because the 80s was when it was very first happening. You know, it was literally the rock. see in uptown and downtown meeting each other for the first time. I mean, you were an architect of so much of why that was going on. And then the 90s was the last era before bottle service, VIP booths, and camera phones. So I think that a lot of it had to do with people were just parting. People were parting with the absence of surveillance.

It was this feeling. And then also people wanted to stay in rooms. because you weren't getting FOMO because you could see another party happening down the street or just text your friend, like, you know, come over here. And then even though, listen, smoking is bad for you, we all know that. But the smoking ban even changed something too because you have people keep going out to have a cigarette. Or there was like, there was something a little cool about the clubs, like just this layer of smoke. I remember going to the first live shows after the smoking band, too, to see bands.

and it was weird not having that protective, like, gauze of weird fucking shit between you and the state. You could just see right through to the band, you know. It was just different. What's your favorite club in the world? There was a club night in London at this club called the Notting Hill Arts Club, another basement. Very special. These two English DJs, Seb Chu and Leo Greenslade, through it. And early in the night, they would have a little showcase for new band or whoever was

launching, and then 11 p.m. it would turn into the club. And because they just became known as the spot to play when you first came to London, it was like Lupe Fiasco, Lily Allen, Kanye, Bruno, Leroux. The list is just like, it's kind of endless. Everybody played their first UK showcase there, because everyone knew that was a spot. And then the party was just insane. And I remember going and playing there my first time. And actually, I remember someone saying like, oh, you've got to come down here.

The DJ Seb is like, he's like the London Mark Ronson. So, of course, I'm like, I'll go down, I'll show them. Like, you know, as much as I ever get into that mode. And I go down and I play my, like, New York set at the time that I just had like clockwork and quick mixes and clever fucking blends and wordplay and all this shit. And the crowd was like, oh, and then Seb just got on, and the first thing he played was some, like, UK, like, garage or drum and bass record that just, like, they were spanging the fucking wall. Like, he just, he didn't, he was, he didn't do it to show me up either.

It was just like, cool, that was a great set. Well, you played all the hip-hop. So let me just play some U-K. It was such an eye-opener, like, oh, there are entire other genres of essentially black music that will bring a fucking house down that I know nothing about. So I loved playing there. I started to go back there and play a lot when my first record came out and the song Uwi with Ghostface and Nate Dog did well in England and didn't do much here, but it kept my buzz and I was going over there to play parties and just, I just loved it. And actually, it inspired me to come back because that was at the time where 2003, New York,

could just because i was just so turned off new york and the bottle service and everything that it had become and i came back and i told qtip i was like yo tip the party i just played in london like you're playing shit that they love and you're playing like OC times up and like underground records and people are just going off like let's just do that shit here and just see and of course you're doing something with cue tip there's going to be in people are going to come down and be excited about it but we found a basement this basement club called Table 50 on Bleaker Street. Actually, my friend Blue Jems, who the book is dedicated to who passed, he found it.

And he was always, like, the person dragging me to some fucking basement being like, go, we got to do a party here, it's going to be the best shit ever. And he was usually right, you know, we go into a basement, a dingy basement at 4 in the afternoon, and he would just have some vision. And it was, and it was like this amazing party that did breathe some life back into both my love for DJing. downtown at that moment and Boston most deaf and people would just come and like grab the mic and shit and get on over it while me and Tip were DJing.

So that party, back to your question, though, in London, Notting Hill Arts Club was a really special place. And it ended, I think, after about 10 years because like a lot of hip-hop parties, there was like some violence in there. But I remember for the 10th anniversary party, I surprised them. Nas was in town. And I was like, I want to give these guys like. the best and this crowd the best

birthday present I can think of. So I managed to work it through and that Nas came and did a surprise set. And one of my favorite Nas songs ever has made you look. It's just such a hard fucking record. And I was Nas as DJ for one night. And there's just this

moment on YouTube and I used to spend many a late night fucking hide watching that one six second over and over. And Nas just goes, yo Mark, hit him with that murder, and I just dropped, made you look. And the whole fucking place came down.

And it was just like, yeah, just, you know, I never stopped being a fan of the artist that I love. And I'm nearly 50 fucking years old. And being on stage, getting to play public service announcement with Jay or Nas, like it will just send me right down to my 18-year-old, whatever it is. How would you say your taste in music is, changed over the course of your life? I think COVID was like a big thing of spending a lot of time at home.

I started to listen to records at home, maybe for the fucking first time, except when I'm at home. I'm listening to records to like quickly look for breaks or listen to what I'm going to spend that night. But actually to listen as a passive listener, and I found like a lot of 50s jazz, 50s and 40s, 50, 60s, jazz, Coltrane and Jerry Mulligan, and then I know it's so fucking, like, it's the cliche, like, rom-com soundtrack, but Chet Baker, just beauty, like music with beauty and simplicity, country music, a lot of, like, classic 50s, 60s, 70s country music.

My wife, like, loved Willie Nelson discovering just the beauty and those things. And then I feel like as I've gotten older, and I remember now it makes sense I saw it with all my favorite artists. You know, I want to challenge myself tonally, quarterly, not because I want to be like up my own ass and make complicated music. Like that's not my thing, but you know, you're just looking to try new things harmonically. So in that jazz and that playing of like Bill Evans and those people,

there's something in there. And I noticed like as I'm making. music now i'm trying to imbue the music that i'm making with that but i also know that like i'm aware you get to this thing that you complicate your music a lot and you're just you're off you're on that next phase of your career and i think i don't know that there's something about me i don't know if it's my fucking ego or my ambition and i'm like okay i'm not ready to go riding off into my prog fusion sunset yet like how do i do this and still do it with the records that i love so it's interesting it's interesting how you know we know this all are as when you're a kid you

just see your favorite artists and you just go oh they went weird or they've started that oh they started to make fucking grown-up music or something like that and then now i understand it you just your taste kept evolving and you were trying out new shit he said your early works were not well received in new york but they were well received in the u.k what do you think it was about those records that worked in the UK. Well, the biggest one was this record Ghost with Ghostface and Nate Dog, Ui. And weirdly, like, that really rang off on the West Coast,

the Toronto, Hawaii. I don't know of what, because I was about saying maybe it's sunny places, but obviously Toronto isn't, but I made a record with Wu-Tang, right, with Ghostface, but it wasn't a hard record. It wasn't like a Wu-Tang record. It had this kind of like bubbly, like slightly disco with the Dennis coffee breakbeat thing to it right so what was I really making I was like in my mind if I'd really thought about the time like there wasn't like an obvious hot 97 record

I was just making some shit that appealed to like the DJ side that like wanted some hard drums but still some fast shit that made people move and I also I do think that growing up in England where you would hear a song an old school reggae song like uptown top ranking by Althea and Donna next to Duran, Duran, next to Bill Withers' Lovely Day, next to maybe like a De La Soul record, there was much less separation of what would be played on the radio because Radio 1 and BBC sort of in England, just like a little more eclectic. I always think about how, you know, Amy Winehouse and Adele and, you know, they're essentially soul singers, but if they hadn't grown up in England with that slightly more English

sensibility like you just mix a bunch of shit together because you love it which seems very inherently what you should do everywhere but it's not quite R&B and things are a little bit more regimented here so yeah i think that there's definitely something about the way i grew up and in the UK that just i hadn't acknowledged so much until like oh that's why these people all like my shit over there can you think of a song that you loved when you were young that you still love and can you think of a song that you loved when you were young and now if you listen to it you can't believe you ever liked it my dad had really great taste that my stepdad was the one in foreign and my dad was just like you know loved

funk soul grand central station parliament funkadelic all this shit so he loved early hip-hop so grandmaster flash and the furious five the message he used to play that all the time me and my sisters would go to visit in England once or twice a year because my parents split. My mom moved to New York and we would dance jumping down, up on his bed, listening to the message. So obviously that's a song I still think is incredible to this day. I listened to a lot of hair metal when I was a kid because I played guitar and bands and that was kind of trendy and I went to like a guitar camp to try and learn to be a shredder

and I fucking hated it and I was not very good, not good enough to be a shredder. So there was a lot of bands like, slaughter, L.A. guns, enough's enough. They were, you know, had some good songs. I don't want to rip into any of them,

but there was some stuff from that that I would probably, if I had to, probably something I wouldn't listen to as much today. And then what's so amazing is when you hear a song that you completely forgot about like there was that band king's x they were kind of like a three piece kind of had like a little bit of a rush proggy thing and i just heard like a king's x song

from that era like i think it was called summerland and i was like this is a gorgeous fucking song yeah just how those songs give you give you this jolt if they can get me for three minutes through my fucking morning run and so grateful for that three minutes where I've just forgot that I hate doing this and I'm fucking panting and about to fall over. And I find like that happens more often with song that I've forgotten about. Tell me about your listening habits. General listening, not related to work. General listening is now with my two and a half daughter.

Most of my passive listening is what she's listening to. And our mutual friend, Richard Russell, gave me this great, like, radio. that's like this little radio for kids that's sort of like environmentally friendly kind of like it's wooden and has these buttons and you can just program all her favorite songs into it. So she's just like there and she loves her radio and I got

her one of those old, here I am just like putting all of my fucking baggage and shit on her. But like this 80s Fisher Price turntable, the one that maybe has like the Sesame Street big bird like as the arm and her 45s. She has our own 45. She can like kind of

put on and so yesterday you know i try and get her like i'm not trying to give her my taste i'm not even trying to like make this look more attractive i don't want her to become a dj any of this stuff or if she finds it great but it's more just like she seems to be drawn to it so she has her 45s and you know a bunch of like disney robin hood whatever the fuck but yesterday she was just playing the pretenders brass in pocket i'm special because i must have put that in her pot and And she was just listening to it over and over again. And it's like, it's just so cool that that's a record that she's picked out, that she's drawn to. And then she loves when we go to my record player and put something on.

She knows that there's like an extra, that's a level up of ceremony or whatever. She's not, dad, da, go listen to chich changes, you know, Bowie. Go listen to chit chich changes by the fireplace, which is where my. record player is, but just letting her find her own music. She happens to love scenario by Tribe Call Quest and shake it off by Taylor Swift and Casey Musgraves, Slow Burn, and whatever she loves. She has her little records, and that's most of my passive listening right now is whatever she has on. Tell me the difference between curating music and having music curated for you.

I know that part of what made me a better DJ, let's just say it in the 90s, was that like I was going out every night to hear other DJs. I was playing four nights a week and two, three of the other nights I was going out to hear other DJs play or they were DJs playing

before me and I was checking out their sets with the DJs after me. You have to go see other people play. I feel like there's so many records, especially now maybe even that if you've heard them or maybe you kind of listen to it on Apple or Spotify you wouldn't even think you might not think that much of it you see it in a club with 300 people fucking going off and pounding the walls and shit it's a totally different

experience so then there's also like this other side of it there's something and I kind of touch on the book because it was such a thing back then in the 90s like weird there was a certain circle of DJs we're all kind of in each other's sphere it was a it was stretch mighty my Riz, Max Glazer, Goldfinger. We all kind of went to each other's sets on our nights off. And then we'd all hang in the booth because we really just all wanted to be asked to fucking get on. Like we didn't know how to really just fully be in a club and enjoy ourselves. Like the idea of like being in this place and not having something to do with this fucking vibe was like sort of drove us crazy.

So we would just wait in the booth. like record vultures until the other DJ had to take a piss and just be like, yo, can you want to get on for a second? So the dichotomy of like, want to go to these other sets, but then only so much because then you're like, fuck, well, now I want to get on. I want some of this glory or some of this energy. You talked about having the acetate for Biggie's new record brought to you and playing it for the first time and the feeling in the room.

We think of hip-hop as so much of a poet. lyrical style and in a club the lyrics are not always so detectable yeah especially on a complicated rap record yeah so if something's not known and you're playing it for the first time it's hard to even know yeah and i think this has even maybe been to my detriment as a someone who makes music i think because drums were my first instrument and I always came from groove first, the beat has always been the first thing that I react to. And I think it wasn't even until I really got into like Bob Dylan was the first time I really appreciate it as like, who cares what the chords are doing?

Like the story is the thing that's important. And I feel like it's fairly obvious from your work. The point of view and story is always the driver. and then there's always great music under it. For me, it's really the beat. It's always been the beat as well. Really? Okay. Yeah.

I mean, of course, for the early records, the beats were crazy too. So, yeah, I feel like as a DJ, and I think that was something we used to talk about when they started to use the thing, hot record all the time. Hot record, yes, but is it a good record, right? Hot record makes you think,

the beat comes on, it's hot. It reminds you of something you heard before, da-da-da-da, like hot, hot. Like, you know, the difference things. I mean, hot and good started to drive me a little bit crazy. But, yes, for a song like Biggie hypnotize, and I think because rappers like Biggie were the timbre of his voice was almost as exciting, it was like the aphrodisiac in the club,

and that unmistakable wheeze, that, oh, like with the beat, the way it dropped, boom, oh, boom, oh, like just came in. I think it was just like a meteor hitting the club, And it was something, Biggie had so many hits at that moment. It was just before he passed. He was the king of New York. It was like there were this moment that you could hear Biggie's voice on anything. And it would probably have worked in the club.

But that was especially special. And, you know, it was like that era of that production of, it was kind of, for lack of a better word, jiggie, it had all those like triangles and shakers. Some of it has aged better than others. but that beat just was heavy. How do you decide what to listen to on your morning run? It's so different because I only started running recently. Like I always hated running.

I had to run in high school because I was so bad at all the other sports because I came here from England when I was eight. You know, like I didn't know, like baseball, football, that shit had already been going on. I was bad at soccer, which everyone assumed that I would be good at soccer, at least. So I had to run cross-country because, like, I just didn't want to do P.E. So this running, it's stamina endurance. Anybody could get through running. So I hate it for most of my life. And then I really fucked up my knee four years ago. And I went on a run for the first time

in five years. Fucked up my knee and did something where I couldn't basically use it for a year or two. And I thought that I was probably done with it. And I didn't. really care either because I wasn't a runner and then when it came back after some like you know a good trainer got it back I was almost like so thrilled to be able to use this thing that I hadn't cared about I just suddenly like I kind of want to run now like it was just a just an interesting thing so running for me is either furious guitars so a lot of that is like for me as like sort of 90s and 2000s like

alt indie guitar, just heavy shit because that has tempo and sometimes it's quickly making like a playlist of songs like the songs that we were talking about that you kind of forgot about that you're like oh yeah I used to love that song because those are nice distractions

and then I found podcasts actually like does take your mind out of anything that's going on certain podcasts like I can't listen to current events. I don't want to hear fucking how shitty than the world is blowing up while I'm doing this. I just want to hear intelligent or funny people take my mind off shit. Tell me about fatherhood. That's the best one. I don't know. It's so, again, cliche, but it is, you know, I didn't have my first kid until I was 47. I have two daughters. And I'm so glad I didn't do it.

Even though I thought of myself as being a good dad, you know, I was like, I can't wait to like give myself to something. But to be honest, the way that I worked and the way that I traveled for work and studio and DJing and all that shit, like, I wouldn't have been around. So if I had had kids back then, I'm sure I would have worked it out and I would have changed my life. But I'm also really grateful for so many reasons to happen when it did also because that's when I met my wife. it's amazing, you know, lucky enough to be working mostly in New York, I ride my bike, I'm five minutes from home, I can go for bath time, and if it's important, come back to the studio. This is the first record I've ever worked on since I've become a dad,

and it is a little tough realigning my, that old part of me that was just like, if you're not in the studio of 14 hours, who are you, or if you're not doing that fucking, not that work ethic, or, there are certain things that are true. I think you leave the studio for an hour and a half. You are maybe offsetting a maybe some kind of zone or some kind of flow state that you might have been in. But that all just sounds a bit like what ifs and excuses to me

because I want to be there. I want to be present for my kids. But yes, as I'm working on this record, there is this slight push and pull between like, But no, but I used to be the guy. And, like, I would drop everything and fly to L.A. The next day for the chance of working with, like, X-person. And it's just, like, it's not that anymore.

So I know that, of course, a certain aspect of the music is going to pay the price for that. Tell me about your experience composing for movies. That's a relatively new thing for you, yes? Yes. That I love. Right now, it's working on a film at the same time as I'm working. on my own record, and when I'm working on my own record, I'm picturing dance floors. I'm picturing who's listening to this. I'm picturing this. There's certain constraints and

things that go on my mind. And when I'm writing for the movie, I'm kind of just going off of pure emotion from what I'm getting out of the script. And I know that we'll shift it and whatever will happen when we start to put it to picture. There are these things, you know, there's a director about me and they're going to be telling me what they want. And sure. But there's something without the, without some of those rules of pop music, I find a little bit freer and say what you want about it. I'm just Ken's song from the Barbie film. Like, I had never really written lyrics for a song before. I never really sat down at piano and done like the whole thing.

You know, I always work with such great lyricists and people with such a strong viewpoint. but I was so inspired by the script and reading it, and I just sat down on the piano and came out with that chorus. If I was thinking in any way, shape, or form that Barbie was going to be some blockbuster movie or that anyone was ever going to hear this song, and I think it goes a little bit back to what we were talking about before, stretching out a little harmonically and genre-wise and getting more experimental and weird,

which is what some of my favorite people do when they make pop music anyway, But for some reason, in my head, I've decided that when I make pop music, it's this. And when I make film music, it's free. I should be fucking bringing some of my film energy into my own music, and that would be a good thing to do. Maybe it'll happen eventually. Maybe you'll talk yourself into it. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I wonder how Trent Resner, I don't know personally, but, like, Nine In In Inche Nails is one of my favorite fucking bands as a kid, the first album. and he manages to do great 9-inch Nails records and do really weird score shit and, you know. Is the club all about dancing or is there more to it?

No, there's definitely more to it. And that's why I called the book Night People because part of it, outside of just the DJing and that side, that emotional side of it and the 90s, this isn't what I set out to do when I started, but what started to unravel is like, oh, yeah, we were all out at night. And I say this in one of the chapters, there's like, it's a difference. There's people who enjoy a night out, and then there's night people.

Night people is like, you kind of live for the night. You're kind of like, maybe you're a little broken, a little damage. I mean, everybody is, right? But like, there's something in the day that makes life, like, it's just a little bit tough. and night gives you this coat of armor or maybe this extra sense of sort of confidence or swagger and also, you know, God knows it's like if you took drugs, it's probably most likely you're doing that at night. There's something that we're running from, running to, I'm not sure. But there was a community of us.

And there are also people who are night people because they really just love to dance and they love music or they loved the sense of commune and there's people that loved it because they wanted to fucking go and get laid people want to get fucked up but i wanted to look at that and there's no set definition to this it's a term i kind of made up like and there's no i'm not a psychologist like i'm getting to the bottom of like everybody's thing of why they're out but i just noticed in my community there was that and i know for me i liked it because i love djing because i grew up in a kind of like broken home and it was some it wasn't the most pleasant place to be and I like the idea of this booth that was this thing that I could like shut out the world essentially like

I am the command of this thing and every fucking fader and dial bends this fucking place to the way I want and there was a little bit of that and I also I took drugs and I'm sure I was like running I was you know I presented as being so together and like functioning, but, you know, then a couple nights a week when the gig was over, I would go and obliterate my mind, you know? So nightlife is, yeah, it's more than just, certainly more than just about the club. Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website.

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