What Lykke Li Does to a Song

Mark Ronson started DJing in downtown New York in 1993, playing for anyone who’d give him five dollars. The road from that to "Über-Producer"—the English-language music press’s term for him, slightly breathless but not inaccurate—is a long and interesting one, and what distinguishes him from others who’ve made similar journeys is that he seems genuinely obsessed with the song itself rather than what the song does for the résumé. Music is too important to me to want to be the super-hot favorite DJ of the famous forever, he’s said. You can hear that priority in the work—the Amy Winehouse records, the Bruno Mars collaboration, all of it built around something beyond craft or commerce. He also has a black border collie named Maude, which I mention because it’s the most human detail in an otherwise implausible biography.

His gift is for finding exactly the right collaborator at exactly the right moment. The Miley Cyrus pairing was better than it had any right to be. But Late Night Feelings, with the Swedish artist Lykke Li, is something else entirely. Lykke Li has spent her career making longing feel precise—I Follow Rivers, Little Bit, that whole quietly devastating register she operates in, where the sadness isn’t wallowing but just very still and very specific. Put that voice next to Ronson’s production instincts and you get something that sounds like 3am in a city you’re not ready to leave.

The video is indecent in the best possible way—hot in a way that has some weight behind it, that costs something to watch. I sat with it for a while after. Whatever he does next, whoever comes after Lykke Li, they’re going to have a hard time topping this one.