Before heading to The Oscars this weekend, Mark Ronson sat down for an interview on #MostRequestedLive!
On whether he had a feeling "Nothing Breaks Like A Heart" would be a success:
"When you know that you have a chorus of a song and it feels special, it makes your hair stand up and you know it's right, you know it's the truth. Then the job is in the mix, and in the additional production -- all those things that you can do to armor it so you make sure that you guys can still play it, that it does sound right in the club -- those are things that I can then take care of... Because I do, once I have a good song, I would like to know that it has the chance to reach as many people as possible. It's obviously a labor of love, but it's a labor for sure."
On how he gets to work with the biggest and best artists:
"I think it's a lot of luck sometimes. With Miley, it was about four years since I saw her singing on 'SNL,' and I was just like, 'Man, I would love to work with her, so enamored with her voice.' But knowing if we had written this song anytime earlier than this past four years, it would have been a different song, probably not as meaningful or powerful... so yeah, these things just happen, I don't question them too much, because I feel like they're a little bit out of my control, but I'm certainly very grateful for how these things happen."
On working with Bruno Mars on "Uptown Funk":
"Bruno, we had this great relationship, and if you're jamming with people as talented as Bruno Mars, and Jeff Basker, and Phil Lawrence, you've got a pretty good chance of coming up with something nice. 'Uptown Funk' was very similar, we had a great first verse that first night, and then we spent seven months to really get that song to the finish line, where we all knew we had made the rest of the song as good as that first verse."
On watching "Shallow" blow up:
"It's really been amazing. The way that we wrote the song was not completely dissimilar to how we wrote songs on Joanne. Gaga was like, 'I wanna write a song for Ally.' It was one of the early songs she wrote when she first knew she was doing A Star Is Born. We just sat down, and we were aware in the room that we were writing for the film, but then the personal thing just taps in and then you're just writing the best song that you can. She's always leading that charge, really, the ideas are in her head, and you're just kind of gently getting them out, some of the ones that seem stuck - offering a couple words to rhyme here and there if she's stuck, but she had most of that in her head. She came with that chorus first, the 'I'm off the deep end,' and it was just... it was kind of an emotional day. I don't mean to sound too corny, but I remember the feeling in that. We were aware that there was something, a little magic happening. That song is so great because it's got sadness, but triumph, and melancholy, and when she sings that 'Tell me something girl,' or 'Tell me something, boy' line, it sounds like she's giving you a hug, like 'it's gonna be alright... Mama monster says it's gonna be alright.'"
Got a question for Mark Ronson? Submit it here for his Ask Anything Chat, airing next Saturday (March 2nd) on #MostRequestedLive!
Listen to Mark Ronson's full interview with Maxwell below
Check out the video for Mark Ronson's collab with Miley Cyrus, "Nothing Breaks Like A Heart," below.