In their nearly three-decade career, Duran Duran have worked with some of music's best producers, from Colin Thurston, who did their first two albums, to Nile Rodgers. But on their latest album, 'All You Need Is Now,' they may have found their best collaborator yet in Mark Ronson. "He's the perfect producer for Duran Duran," Nick Rhodes tells Spinner. "That's really saying something."
So, what makes the partnership between the two so special? "He gets all of our references. He, like us, looks into other worlds -- into fashion, art, photography, graphic design. He's interested in those things and he has a lot of the same references," Rhodes says. "It's important that we maintain our identity and, if anything Mark has done to bring focus back to the band is zero in on the true identity of Duran Duran."
Ronson, of course, is an unabashed Duran fan. When he visited Spinner for his Interface taping, he told Spinner, "My very favorite first band was probably Duran Duran." Rhodes says that also made a big difference in what Ronson brought to the project. "That's why our relationship was such a dream, because he was already a big Duran Duran fan," he says. "He was very familiar with our entire catalog, including all the obscure B-sides, so he was able to reference our own material and say, 'What about we do it a little more like this?'"
The result is an album that Rhodes believes gets back to what Duran Duran always strived for -- touching people musically. "When you make a record, you get in there with the best intentions to make something that captures people's imaginations, something that really taps into the consciousness," Rhodes says. "We want to find a way to affect people, to touch people. Having Mark on board for us this time has enabled us to do more simply in that he already knew that's what we needed to do. I have no doubt that the series of songs that are on this record are as good as anything we've done for decades really. I hope [the public] will agree and that people connect with them emotionally in the way that they have with us during the writing process."
Courtesy of Spinner
