Thursday, November 3, 2016

Bruno Mars Talks Perfectionism

Bruno Mars is on the cover of this month's Rolling Stone. Here are some of the highlights from the accompanying interview:

On being a perfectionist:
"I've been living in this damn box for 18 months! It's right there, man. I've got to finish one song and tighten up the bridge on another, and I'm pretty much done. I want to be finished by the middle of next month. I do have a deadline. And this shit ain't cheap!...We're at the point now where we're losing our fucking minds. My engineer's going crazy; he wants to kill me. This process is just such a weird process. Sitting in this freezing-ass-cold box trying to come up with songs."

On Skrillex:
"[Skrillex] is a sonic genius, and his version is amazing. There's just something that's still not happening for me. The groove ain't right, or we're not doing something on the chorus – I don't know the exact math. I'm just trying to figure out why I'm tuning out in certain parts."

On the pressure to follow up Uptown Funk:
"Coming off the biggest song of my career, it was super-daunting to come in here. I don't know if people are going to love this shit. I don't know if radio is going to play it. But what I don't want to have happen is I put it out and say, 'Damn it, if I'd just done this and this, maybe it would have had a shot.'"

On testing his songs out while driving:
"We've worked on songs till 3 or 4 in the morning, like, 'This is gonna be the first single!' – and the minute I take it to the car, it's so obvious we were tripping. Something happens when you roll down your window and you can hear the traffic and real noise – the way people are actually going to hear it." 

On songwriting:
"Bro, it's the hardest. Every beat has already been made, every rhyme has already been said, every chord progression has already been done. I'm competing with billions of other songs ... It's like winning the lottery – you just gotta get lucky."

Read the full interview at Rolling Stone.


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