



“Run your fingers down the cool underbelly of the blue evening,” sings Kevin Parker of the band Tame Impala in his haunting, echoey vocals. “Crank that vapour-wagon, start that kick and dragon beating.”

The song, Daffodils, is one of the soul-infused tracks that will feature on Mark Ronson’s long-anticipated new album. It is also the fruit of one of the most interesting modern creative collaborations to emerge between the world of music and literature – for it was Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, who wrote the lyrics.

Uptown Special, Ronson’s first album for four years, will feature the acclaimed American author’s lyrics on more than half the tracks when it is released in January. Ronson is renowned for his collaborations, working with musicians as diverse as Adele, Lily Allen, Boy George and Duran Duran, but this is the famed producer’s first lyrical partnership with a novelist.

Ronson said he had speculatively approached Chabon to work on the project more than a year ago simply out of a love of his writing. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was the first book that I can really say I didn’t want to ever end and when it did I was in tears,” he said in his distinctive transatlantic drawl. “Since then, it’s been a book I’ve bought for everyone I love.”

The idea to write to Chabon, whom he had met just once briefly at a New York party, came to Ronson when he and his co-producer Jeff Bhasker began writing music for the album and realised they wanted lyrics that were “more ambitious, that were about more than heartache or the dance floor and actually told stories”.

Ronson said: “I just thought, ‘I’m going to write Michael Chabon a letter and tell him that I’m a fan of his writing and see if he would write me some lyrics.’ I knew he was a music enthusiast, particularly because of all the musical references in his novel Telegraph Avenue. And he wrote back a couple days later saying that he would love to.”

Ronson, 39, is one of the most influential and well-connected figures in the music industry. His work on Back to Black by Amy Winehouse helped it win five Grammy awards and he was named best male solo artist at the Brits for his 2007 album Version.

But part of Ronson’s desire to push the boundaries, lyrically and musically, with Uptown Special – his first release in more than four years – came from a general disillusionment with the American R&B now filling the charts, compared with the soul and funk records of the 70s and 80s.

“The lack of anybody trying to say anything really interesting in mainstream R&B, pop and soul music at the moment, I find a little depressing,” he said. “With this album, I wanted to make something that could sit rightfully on the shelf with my own favourite American R&B, soul, jazz and blues records from the 70s and 80s, when the lyrics were really striving for something.”

For Chabon, a self-confessed music junkie with favourites ranging from Joni Mitchell and Elvis Costello to Mos Def and Rakim, Ronson’s request was a “bolt from the blue. It was something I had never, ever remotely imagined having the opportunity to do at all, even though I am a huge music fan and have been obsessing over lyrics and writing lyrics for my whole life,” he said. “But in my mind, it was like saying I had a chance to become an NBA basketball player or something”.

He immediately began writing his first lyrics for a song called Crack in the Pearl, which appears on the album, in Ronson’s words “a little edited down”.

“The lyrics he sent us originally were wild and amazing, but totally out there,” said Ronson. “So we were like, ‘OK, the great Michael Chabon has spoken: let’s make these lyrics into a song’. Michael is one of the greatest living American authors and has this way with language so he obviously brought something to this record that no other songwriter would have thought of in a million years.”

Since releasing his debut novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh when he was 25 and winning the Pulitzer in 2001, Chabon, 51, is often referred to “as one of the most celebrated authors of his generation”. Yet he says that adapting his writing style from the relative freedom of the novel to the precise musical and physical restrictions of a song was a “brilliant challenge”.

Chabon wrote some of the songs “cold”, before Ronson had composed any music; for others, he was sent a raw track and came up with lyrics to fit.

The author walked the streets of New York, listening to the raw track on repeat until it was burned into his brain before writing the words. It was a process, he said , that had also given him a new-found admiration for contemporary pop music. When he was struggling, he asked himself not only “What would Joni [Mitchell] do?” but also: “What would I do if I was writing this song for Katy Perry?”

Bhasker, he said, “would send me back to the woodshed over and over again”. With one song, now titled Leaving Las Feliz, Chabon wrote three completely different sets of lyrics till he hit on something all three felt worked.

“It was a different creative process from writing my books, primarily because it is so collaborative and that was the beautiful thing about it for me,” he added. “I will lean more towards the wistful, melancholy regretful note in my lyrics and Mark tends to favour the more optimistic lyrics – that tension, if you will, proved really fruitful.”

For Ronson, Chabon’s contribution is not the album’s only unique aspect. Ronson and Bhasker went on a road trip from New Orleans, through Mississippi and up to Chicago, visiting gospel churches along the way as they searched for inspiration, and a singer for the tracks the pair had begun to write.

“Jeff and I were writing these songs for someone with a young Chaka Khan-type voice, but we didn’t know who was going to sing them,” said Ronson. “And then one night, at two in the morning after a couple of whiskeys, Jeff said, ‘You and I need to drive through the south and do a trip called the Mississippi mission. We are going to drive round all these churches and find that singer.’ Somehow we got it together.”

It was a trip that Ronson acknowledges as hugely formative for Uptown Special – as he says “the trip just became everything for this album. We went to about 20 or 30 churches and saw these incredible singers”. It was in Mississippi that the pair stumbled upon Keyone Starr, the daughter of a preacher, who had been banished from the church after becoming pregnant. The moment she opened her mouth to perform Lauryn Hill’s The Sweetest Thing, with “this amazing burnt, rasping quality to her voice”, Ronson said they knew they had found their singer.Starr became a key vocal collaborator on the album, alongside others including Andrew Wyatt and Bruno Mars.

The trip also inspired Ronson’s decision to record most of Uptown Special in Memphis, at Royal Studios which has hosted acts such as Al Green, Chuck Berry and De La Soul. Memphis’s musical heritage unavoidably seeped into the record, said Ronson, and is particularly noticeable with Uptown Funk, the lead single which is out on 11 January, featuring Bruno Mars on vocals.

Bringing together influences from 1960s funk to Michael Jackson and the Doobie Brothers, the song took Ronson seven months to finish “because we kept knowing it would be better”.

For Chabon, the memory of his time in the Memphis studio with Ronson is one he struggles to recall without an endearing measure of disbelief. “The words ‘a dream come true’ are completely inaccurate because I would never have the chutzpah to have a dream like that,” said Chabon. “To be in Royal Studios in Memphis where Al Green recorded all his best records, where Ann Peebles recorded all her best records. To sit there in a studio that was constructed by Willie Mitchell and watch Willie Weeks and Steve Jordan, two of the greatest session musicians who ever lived, play bass and drums, and for Kevin Parker from Tame Impala to be singing the lyrics to a song I wrote – it was absurd. Every so often, I would text my wife and say ‘I cannot believe I am here’.”

In the words of Ronson, this album is “definitely the most fully realised record, by far, that I’ve ever done”, with the two years between completing Record Collection and beginning work on Uptown Special giving the producer much needed distance.

“After Version – and I’m not disowning Record Collection, there are things on that I’m really proud of – but there’s a syndrome after you make a really successful record you get a little self-indulgent,” he said. “With the amount of people who buy albums these days and the amount of competition with singles, unless I make the best possible shit I can, what is the point of putting it out?”

Uptown Funk, the record’s lead single, is released on 11 January and the album, Uptown Special, is out on 26 January