Top 55 Ron Mael Quotes

To us, something can be uplifting even if the tone of it is not cheerful – it can be uplifting because it’s just so well done.

What we do is pretty stylised. It hasn’t got mass appeal. This, combined with the fact that we’ve never been over-exposed, seems to have created a certain mystery.

In the U.S., many people thought what we were doing was frothy, silly, just not serious enough. The kind of pop role-playing we were aiming for was out of place in American pop culture.

When I think of Venice Beach, my father’s painting is what comes to mind.

In a certain way, longevity is its own kind of success. While we would like to be in the position of those bands that are secure in ways that maybe we’re not, we kind of feel like we’re in a better position. We’re bitter for short periods of time, but in the long run, we think we won out.

The device of speaking directly to the listener is as old as Shakespeare’s asides and probably much older than that. Still, we try to balance those moments with many more moments of utter sincerity and I believe the same is true in ‘Annette.’

We were really fortunate that what we were doing happened to work on television.

When we were growing up, Russell and I were into The Who, The Move, The Kinks, early Pink Floyd, really good tight pop bands.

You have to have an enemy to react against. We think it’s important to have a sort of us-versus-them situation.

The one factor that determines how people get along best is a shared sense of humor.

I feel there are Sparks songs that are somehow both commenting on a song while at the same time being the song. In a sense, this is breaking down the fourth wall of hiding behind the traditional song form and speaking past the song to the listener.

The artificiality of a movie musical is something we feel really comfortable working within.

We sometimes feel a little world-weary where pop music is going.

The first time we wrote a full-blown movie musical was our adaptation of ‘Mai, the Psychic Girl’ for Tim Burton, which didn’t get made. We learned pretty early on from that experience how to incorporate dialogue into a musical setting that feels naturalistic while still feeling stylized.

Having more people accepting what you’re doing – that’s the kind of limelight we really cherish.

Being brothers is why it’s worked so long. I have that security working with Russell. Working on my own, I’d be really nervous – I wouldn’t be able to take it.

Songs like ‘So May We Start’ and ‘We Love Each Other So Much’ aren’t song-songs; they’re more like rhythmic speaking, not in a rock-music kind of way but as actual dialogue.

I like Strauss’s operas because it’s all women’s voices; I like opera that’s hysterical.

Over 10,000 years of human history, I suppose it’s been proven that there is an appeal to the idea of having a family. Just not for me.

When we first started in Los Angeles, we thought of ourselves in our own delusional way as being a British band, even though we’d never been to England at that point, so musically it’s kind of sometimes hard to place where we’re from.

Obviously we have a sensibility that’s aligned to everything we’ve done but we try not within certain ways to repeat ourselves.

To be sitting on a movie set in Brussels and watching Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard singing something you wrote – it’s surreal, way beyond what we expected.

When things come back and we’re in some small way cast as the originators of a movement, we don’t take it as much as a compliment as some people may consider it.

I don’t think it’s especially praiseworthy that even in those periods when things around us were kind of dire, we were working on the music. There isn’t an alternative; that kind of work ethic is all that there is.

Britain’s always been our home from home.

Well, I haven’t been a delivery boy for quite a long time.

In a personal way, we like to irritate by just staying around.

Yeah, ‘Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth.’ I almost hate to admit what it was originally intended to be, but it’s been taken on as being an early example of a song that is championing saving the environment. The song was actually written to be, ‘Watch out for mother nature; it can be very devastating.’

If you don’t like this, we don’t care – I think that’s the essence of what popular music should be.

There is something encouraging about the rebellious spirit of the Internet. It’s like the modern equivalent of punk – anyone can make a record. But it’s only the means of distribution that is different rather than the content.

We think it’s important to do something that’s polarizing.

We don’t set out to be polarizing. But just by the nature of what we’ve always done, it seems to have a certain polarizing aspect, so it kind of seemed almost natural that a film that we would be involved in would have that same kind of reaction.

We’ve really learned to ignore past failures.

I’m basically a stoic person anyway, so I just decided to maybe emphasise that, and I was surprised as anybody that it was gaining as much attention as all the jumping about.

Gould recorded Bach’s ‘Variations’ twice but the 1955 one was so fresh. He had a quirky approach to playing and he looked better than anybody: he would lean back on a tiny stool, wearing overcoats and scarves.

Even though we try not to be nostalgic about drawing from old music, I’m always inspired by things like old Cole Porter songs or the words in the Gershwin songs or even Stephen Sondheim, where there’s a real craft to them but it isn’t only that you’re hearing the words it’s that it links so well with the music.

We just thought that bands from the U.S. in general were just really boring, and they didn’t represent what we felt pop music should be.

Something that means a lot to me is when people from other fields are inspired by what we’re doing.

There’s something about Cannes being this ultimate film destination, and we’re passionate about films; we grew up with foreign films.

I have a huge interest in sports, and I study the way athletes operate throughout their careers.

Every Sparks album is a new album when it’s the first one you’re hearing.

We want to challenge even the people who are familiar with what we’ve done in the past.

It’s important that people realize that, with what we do, we aren’t necessarily the ones saying what’s being said. It’s a character within the song.

We actually were passionate about the British bands.

I don’t know why, but I collect the hand sanitizers in every country that we visit.

I never felt comfortable with long hair so it didn’t make sense to be looking that way.

We’ve kind of always felt a certain illegitimacy about what we’ve done.

Our main love has always been pop music. We love the restrictions of it in a certain sense, the length and the repetitiveness. But then how much can you get away with – our intention is always to stretch ourselves.

We already tried writing musicals. Sometimes that failure can become a cause for us. We had so much passion for the idea of doing a movie musical that it finally happened.

To us the music is the most important element and they lyrics are something that adds an extra element.

We’re not trying to be esoteric. There is that about what we do, but we like to be there at the table with everybody else, commercially speaking.

That’s something we really enjoy – incorporating things that don’t ordinarily find people breaking into song.

I would be happy presenting our albums as part of a joint autobiography.

We always start with the music even though people assume that the lyrics are the essence.

Even when something’s funny, it has to be well-written, too. So we are really aware of the craft part of pop music. We really have a respect for the genre and feel that it’s valuable. It’s legitimate in its own way and it has as many possibilities as any other kind of music.