Original subtitles

Hi, I'm Jeff Bhasker.

Welcome to my studio in the lovely Hollywood Hills of California.

Today, we're going to talk about the amazing record "Uptown Funk."

Let's do it.

You are tuned in to Mix With The Masters.

We're going to kind of walk through some of the story

of creating the records, writing the songs, and a lot of the story

that went along with the making of those records.

And I thought I'd start a little by talking about my journey

of becoming a producer, which started in New Mexico where I grew up,

and started at the piano, at the musical score

because I started as a jazz pianist and composer.

That also kind of informed a lot of my production style in thinking

about the arrangement, primarily in a...

maybe a little more of an old school sense.

While, although today we do think of the arrangement when we take loops

and samples and things, it's not too dissimilar, but I think sometimes

that gets a little lost, that we are combining elements that make up

a sonic field and that play different roles in a composition or a record.

In New Mexico, there wasn't a lot to do there, so I spent a lot of time

at the piano and kind of dreaming and being inspired

by modernists like Miles Davis and Duke Ellington and Igor Stravinsky.

And I thought, "Gosh, after growing up

in a family of Indian doctors, how could I make a career in music?"

And I thought, "Maybe I could be a session player in Los Angeles one day."

I had a book called... It was about becoming...

It was like "The Complete Pianist" or something like that,

and it had these interviews with all of these pianists at the end.

Herbie Hancock.

Chick Corea.

Jan Hammer.

All these legends that I grew up kind of idolizing.

So, it's another seed that kind of led then to going to Berkeley College

of Music to study jazz.

And then the advent of digital recording and sequencing kind of

bled into becoming a producer and recording music rather than composing,

arranging and forming groups to play it.

Recording it kind of was a little bit more exciting and immediate.

And then I could also do it myself because I kind of picked up

learning how to play various instruments in school band,

that was a big part of my musical training, was playing in school band.

Even before high school, starting in elementary school,

I started playing clarinet in marching band.

Then in high school, I played in what we called

concert band, which is the marching band

during the sports season and parade season.

And I played tuba, I played baritone horn,

I played saxophone, I played quad toms.

Because I was kind of a natural, I like to learn by ear,

so my teacher would always say, "Okay, you're going to learn this this year.

You're going to learn this this year."

But every day, for four years, playing an instrument,

even in this kind of fairly mid-level training, was a really great training

to familiarize myself with scores, composition, rehearsing,

and preparation, which became another big part of my practice.

You know, I actually started working with Kanye West as his keyboardist

and then became his music director.

And then that also became really useful and a practice

that he kind of enforced to think of the live performance

when you're making the record, which is really, really useful as an artist,

for an artist or as a producer to think about that, how the record

is going to serve the artist in their live performance, because

live performance is one of the most lucrative parts of an artist's career.

And also, if you maybe to be a purist or philosophical about it,

that's the essential, and really, it's the moment when the audience

and the artist come together, which is the purest form of experiencing music.

So, thinking about how the record will translate live

was a really important part in both of these pieces.

My journey of producing, as I mentioned, when I became Kanye's music director,

there was a period when we did a lot of records,

and were touring at the same time, so it was a really exciting time

to be able to test things out, which is also, I think,

an awesome part of EDM and DJ music

that they can kind of try things out on an audience constantly,

and that there's a really, really strong bond

between the audience and the performer.

I think that's one element that maybe people can knock DJs

for not being musicians and pressing a button to trigger the music.

But they do perform for an audience and have to create

an atmosphere and a mood.

That's a really important part of creating recorded music to create an atmosphere

and an experience that can translate to a lot of different settings.

So, maybe with that in mind, we'll go into "Uptown Funk."

Which is a record on Mark Ronson's "Uptown Special" featuring Bruno Mars,

produced by Mark, Bruno, and myself.

Bruno is a really special musician who I actually met in Los Angeles

kind of early on in both our careers.

He was, I think 17 years old, fresh off the plane from Hawaii.

Before I worked with Kanye, I actually had a pretty big placement

as a producer on the rapper, The Game's first album,

which was a huge album.

Produced by Dr. Dre, Timbaland, Kanye, Just Blaze.

And Jeff Bhasker. Who the hell is that?

So, I had that kind of breakthrough after I first moved to LA

from New York where I was struggling mightily.

But for some reason in LA, that was the first track I made

and the first track I placed.

Things just seemed to kind of click for me in LA,

and that's something that can happen often.

It's like, you'll struggle a lot and hone your craft

and go through some changes, and then boom, all of a sudden

things can happen pretty quickly.

And then nothing can happen at all.

So, after The Game album dropped, I thought maybe it'd be off to the races.

In that case, I had moved to LA with a focus of really working

on my songwriting because I'd been producing a lot, but I really wanted

to dive more into creating the song that I was producing.

Because I was producing a lot of artists and songwriters

that had songs, so I thought, "I like to sing, and I could make the records,"

so I thought I'd get more into songwriting.

And Bruno had been signed by a pair of music executives,

Steve Lindsey and Mike Lynn.

Mike Lynn who was involved with buying the track for The Game album.

And they signed Bruno.

And so they said, "Hey, you should meet this guy.

Get together with him and work with him."

So, about two years, we worked on learning how to write songs

and were kind of coached and critiqued by Steve Lindsey,

who's an amazing executive and a musician in his own right,

and has an amazing kind of bag of guidelines, rules, tricks of the trade

on how to write hit songs.

So, we would write songs and Steve would critique them.

And then that's when I got the Kanye gig and went on tour with Kanye,

and Bruno said, "What am I going to do?"

And I said, "Just keep doing what you're doing."

We actually had a cover band at the time with him and his brother

who still plays in his band and was a police officer at the time.

So, I went on with Kanye, and then a couple years into that,

I was driving to the studio one day and I heard,

♪ "Beautiful girls, all over the world." ♪

And I said, "Oh, my God, that's Bruno."

This is a hit song.

He's going to blow up.

And he did.

Then I worked a little bit on his first album, but then for his second album

he said, "I got this master plan, I want it for my second album.

I want it to be produced by you and Mark Ronson.

And I said, "Wow, that sounds great."

Because I was a huge fan of Mark Ronson and I'd listened

to his Amy Winehouse records and be like,

"God, how did he get that snare sound?"

And try to emulate it and try to figure it out, and...

I just thought he was such an...

Sonically and using live instruments, he was so meticulous

and got an amazing pop sound out of live instruments,

which isn't really easy to do coming from a jazz background.

I always loved trying to record live instruments, but I kind of gravitated

towards using more drum machines and samples, for the drums particularly

because sonically, it was very difficult to get a really great drum sound.

Mark's records always had an amazing punch, sonic groove,

which had a lot to do with the drummer himself, Homer Steinweiss,

and the collective, the Daptones that Mark teamed up with

to do the Amy Winehouse records.

We did Bruno's second album, and I got to meet Mark,

who I was a big fan of, and turned out he was a big fan of mine.

And after that record, Mark asked me to produce his album

with him called "Uptown Special."

It's an amazing album. It had this whole narrative.

We brought this writer, Michael Chabon, in.

Stevie Wonder's on the album playing harmonica to some melody that I wrote.

I'm like, "Bucket list can die now."

But of course, we wanted to get in with Bruno and do a record with him,

so we went to his little studio in Hollywood that he had,

which is a really, really modest, (crappy) studio.

But he had a drum kit set up there, and we said,

"Okay, what are we going to do?"

It just kind of started as a jam, and kind of Bruno sat down

at the drum kit and just started playing this.

This actually got re-recorded later, but that's actually

Bruno playing the drums.

But he started playing that, and then I think I started playing

something like this along with it.

All right, more like this maybe.

And Mark's playing along.

So, that's kind of basic jam like this.

I know we had this, too.

So, we kind of basically had that, and we were like,

"This feels good. This feels good."

It wasn't as polished as that either, but Mark had that for like a month,

played it for people at the label, I think radio people,

all kinds of people, and they were just like,

"This is a hit. This is a hit song."

And I'm like, "Okay. Feels good."

I wasn't sure if it was a hit song, but that's how the record started.

Over the course of a year, pretty much, we kind of figured out

basically how to deliver on that feeling all the way

through the record, because the problem was, we got to the chorus

and we tried a few choruses, Bruno was touring on the road.

We tried a few choruses, which I don't think I have any of in here,

but none of which seemed to stack up to.

♪ "This shit, that ice cold." ♪

So, the real problem was figuring out how to take it somewhere

because for me at least, you need us, you want to come out the gate strong,

but the chorus should really deliver you to a new level and a new place.

We're having trouble getting there.

Also along the way, Bruno decided that we needed something like this.

Which is a huge hook in the song.

So, I think they recorded that on tour and sent it to us.

So, basically, this record started getting pieced together,

ideas flying back and forth, which is pretty commonplace now, but this is...

When is this record made?

It's at least six or seven years ago.

So, pre-pandemic.

We're sharing a lot of ideas and trying to figure out how to make this

record bulletproof, which is kind of something I think both Bruno and Mark

and myself always tried to enforce.

I think you'll listen to all of our records.

Most hit records and most great producers, you want to get to a place

where this record really doesn't have any flaws

and never falls apart, always keeps you interested.

So, as you go in the song, things are coming into your ear

and introduce the information.

Basically, one element.

Two elements.

Beat is strong.

Also, at the time, funk music was not a thing.

That was not a cool thing to be doing.

So, there's a little bit different territory, which is good.

Also, at that time, it's maybe a little bit lost now,

although maybe not lost, but there's so much music now,

which is really exciting, but it's hard to kind of

find something that defines an era.

Maybe this is one of these songs that kind of defines a moment

as something that everyone was into.

So, that's kind of an interesting choice to kind of ponder

how daring or brave you want to go.

Then maybe Kendrick Lamar is an artist who might say,

I'm actually going to have really different sonic palette around this.

So, at the time, it's interesting to go back to this and think about

how kind of different these sounds were for a pop record.

Another interesting part, "Girls sing your Hallelujah."

The live element.

Guess what happens at the show when you'd say this part?

Always get to tell the audience what to do.

And then there, then we kept having different hooks like, funky,

funky is a funk time.

We were like "What are we going to do?"

What we ended up deciding on was to bring back a really kind of

standard thing that used to be in the past, is have a dance.

The hook is actually a dance where everyone dances, which is an amazing thing

to be able to pull off on a record

where everyone just dances at this part.

They know that's their part.