They’ve spent more than half a century together as bandmates and put out dozens of records. But the brothers behind the art-pop band Sparks have no intention of retiring anytime soon. The band’s sound has been ever-evolving since its inception. Ron and Russell Mael see resisting any impulse to remain the same as a central priority. The pair spoke with The Associated Press ahead of the release of their 28th studio album, “Mad!,” on Friday. They say they have no plans to retire and find it meaningful that younger generations are finding their music.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — They’ve spent more than half a century together as bandmates, putting out dozens of records. But brothers Ron and Russell Mael — the duo behind the art-pop band Sparks — have no intention of retiring anytime soon.
The band's sound has been ever-evolving since its inception. Ron, 79, and Russell, 76, view resisting any impulse to remain the same or rest on a previous record's success as a central priority. Ahead of the release of “Mad!,” their 28th studio album, on Friday, as well as an upcoming tour, the pair spoke with The Associated Press about why they keep working, not waiting for inspiration to strike and why it’s been so meaningful for younger generations to find their music. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
RUSSELL: After 28 albums, the challenge is just trying to find new ways to kind of retain the universe that Sparks has created, but to obviously try to make it fresh for people that have been following the band for a long time. And the other thing is also just to try to make an album that maybe doesn’t sound like it’s from a band with a 28-album-long history, so that if someone were to pick up the new “Mad!” album, and this was the first exposure they had to Sparks, that it would be as poignant and provocative in all sorts of ways as anything we’ve done in our past.
RON: When we first started out, we had never even been to Europe or anywhere. But we kind of pretended like we were a British band because that was the music that we really responded to. And we always kind of liked bands that had an image. LA bands, in general — at the time we were starting — an image was something that ran counter to musical integrity. And we always thought that was ridiculous. So, we kind of were in general just really attracted to British bands.
Other than a few things like The Beach Boys and that sort of thing, in general, we weren’t influenced by LA bands at all.
RON: Other people tell us we’re prolific and we don’t really sense that. I mean, the one thing we do do is not wait for inspiration. We kind of have to pursue it. When you wait for that lightning bolt, it kind of can take more time than you really want to take waiting. We work a lot knowing that not everything is going to pan out. But in order to kind of give the appearance of being prolific, we have to actually sit down and pursue those things rather than waiting for some kind of divine inspiration.
RUSSELL: Retiring? What’s that? If your whole thing in life kind of is creating stuff, there’s no, you know, there is no such thing as doing something else, so, you know, it hasn’t crossed our minds. Maybe we’re blind or something to that, but no, we’re really happy.
RUSSELL: We’re happy with the younger following and really diverse following also that Sparks has. It’s just kind of reassuring to us that what we’re doing is connecting in a modern way to younger people and really diverse sorts of people as well. And so that’s almost the most satisfying thing. Obviously, we’re happy that we have fans that have stuck with us from Day 1 and that they’re still there. But then having new fans that are kind of coming with a different reference point to what Sparks is — with some of the older fans, it’s like, “That was the golden era,” or whatever, but the younger fans don’t have those reference points in a really healthy way, we think. And so, from the last few years of albums that we’ve had, those for them are the golden era of Sparks and right now is the golden era.
RUSSELL: To even kind of even comprehend that all of the Palisades is just … you know, it was really sad. The elementary school that I went to got completely destroyed so it’s just hard to comprehend. It’s pretty staggering.
