Talking to Mark Ronson at the Top of a Mountain

We bumped into Mark Ronson at Snowbombing, somewhere around 2,500 meters up, that weird altitude where everything feels slightly surreal. He was about to DJ for a crowd of young people who would treat him like a god, and he seemed relaxed about the whole thing. I asked if he had a few minutes to talk, and he did. We’d been listening to Record Collection obsessively since it came out, so the timing felt lucky.

I told him the album was sitting permanently on my iPod, which might sound quaint now but felt like the highest compliment you could give a record. I asked about the next single, what was coming next. He said they’d been working on remix versions because the album landed so well. The next single would come from that, he figured—the album was packed with collaborations, so why not mine them. Boy George, MNDR, Ghostface Killah. These were people he actually wanted to work with, not names on a contract.

They’d done it in Brooklyn. He kept coming back to that—the place itself, the people in the room together, the creative atmosphere you can’t manufacture. He said it was unreal in the best way. I asked if the weight of all those names, all that star power on one album, felt like a lot of responsibility. He said it wasn’t always easy, but mostly it was fun. The right people in the right room tend to make good things happen.

When I asked if he was satisfied with how it turned out, he didn’t hesitate. Best album he’d made, he said. The remixes were going to be incredible. I believed him. He was already thinking about the stage, about getting up there, about the show. The conversation wound down naturally. He told me to enjoy the weather and the music. Then he was gone, off to his set, and we never really said goodbye.